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Report 


OF THE 


PROCEEDINGS OF THE MEETING 


THE PACIFIC COAST 
Liberal Christian Conference 
fae A SAN VPFRANCISCO, 

Reiter i i886 


C. A. Murpock & Co., PRINTERS, 532 CLAY STREET. 
1886. 


—— 


“4 





ADDRESS 


‘CALLING FOR A PACIFIC COAST LIBERAL CHRISTIAN CONFERENCE. 


FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF SAN FRANCISCO. 
September 25, 1885. 


It is proposed to hold a conference of Liberal Christians in San 
Francisco, on the 1st, 2d, 3d and 4th of November. The object of 
the Conference is to cherish that broad ground of fellowship and 
communion which does not prescribe forms of intellectual assent, but 
unites Christians in the great common objects of human interest, wel- 
fare and service, and applies Christian principles to individual and 
social life. The presence and co-operation of those who are inter- 
ested in this object, and in an unsectarian Christianity, is earnestly 
desired. There are communities, from British Columbia on the 
north to the boundary of Mexico on the south, in which there are 
those who wish to see religion set free from exclusive dogma, and 
treated as a great fact of human nature and human life in its applica- 
tion to all human interests. - We send our message, therefore, not only 
to churches, but to communities and individuals, giving them our salu- 
tations and inviting them to come. 

In any community, district or village where a few persons are inter- 
ested in this general Christian object, if they will choose one or two of 
their number to be present as delegates to the Conference, those so 
chosen will be received and hospitably provided for during the Con- 
ference. If delegates thus chosen will report on their arrival in the 
city at the parlors of the Unitarian Church, Geary street, near Stock- 
ton, they will there find a Committee waiting to receive them. 

In due time an order or general arrangement of the meetings of the 
Conference will be printed. For the present it may be sufficient to 
indicate an outline of the occasion. 

The Convention will begin with religious service on Sunday morn- 
ing and evening, November 1st; Monday morning, organization of the 
Conference by choice of officers, After the organization, the Confer- 


4 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE, 


ence will be occupied with themes of discussion, reading of papers 
written for the occasion, and social and religious meetings. Among 
the themes that will be offered for consideration, two or three will give 
an idea of their range and purpose— 


Is there a prospect of a more perfect union among Christians? 


What are the facts of the relation of capital and labor, and how do morals 
apply to those facts? 


What is the duty of the State toward vagrant or criminal children? 


What is the proper line of Church work? 


If those intending to be present will please notify the Committee it 
will aid in carrying out our plan. 


Louis H. BONESTELL, 
Chairman Board of Trustees, First Unitarian Church, 
San Francisco. 
HORATIO STEBBINS, 
Minister First Unitarian Church, 
San Francisco. 
THosr iL, sELtoT, 
Minister Church of Our Father, 
Portland, Or. 
DAVID CRONYN, 
Minister Unitarian Church, 
San Diego, Cal. 


COMMITTEE. 


CB INE ES Bole EP @) Ree 


Monpay, November 2d, 1885—-Morning Session. 


The Conference was called to order at 10:30 A.m., by Mr. Chas. A. 
Murdock, of San Francisco, who nominated Mr. L. H. Bonestell as 
temporary Chairman. 

Prayer was offered by Rev. Thomas L. Eliot, of Portland, Oregon. 

On motion, Mr. Chas. M. Gorham, Mr. Chas. A. Murdock and 
Rey. David Cronyn were appointed a Committee on Permanent Or- 
ganization. 

A recess of ten minutes was then taken. 

Upon reassembling, the Committee on Organization reported the 
following permanent officers of the Conference: 


Presidenti—Hon. HORACE Davis, of San Francisco. 


Vice Presidents—Judge M. A. Luce, of San Diego; 
Mr. F. H. KNIGHT, of Santa Barbara; 
Mr. W. M. Lyon, of Sacramento; 
Mr. GORDON G. GAMMoNns, of Portland, Oregon; 
Mr. A. SNYDER, of Seattle, W. T. 


_ Secretaries—Rev. C. P. MAssEy, of Sacramento; 
SHELDON G. KELLOGG, Esq., of San Francisco. 

The report was adopted, and the gentlemen named declared the 
permanent officers of the Conference. 

Upon taking the chair, President Davis delivered a short odcrees 
in which he gave a clear and concise statement of the Liberal 
Christian belief. 

Mr. Murdock moved that a Committee of Three be appointed by 
the Chair, to whom all resolutions should be referred for consideration 
before being acted upon by the Conference. 

Adopted. 

The Chair appointed as such Committee Mr. Chas. A. Murdock, 
Rev. A. W. Jackson and Mr. L. H. Bonestell. 

The Chair requested all those gentlemen or ladies who were present 
as delegates from organized churches, or who were in sympathy with 
the objects, and desired to be considered a part of the Conference, to 
hand their names to the Secretaries. 


PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


Rev. Dr. Stebbins stated that many letters of regret of inability to 
attend had been received. Of those in attendance many are not ac- 
credited delegates from any religious body. Nevertheless, they rep- 
resented their own liberal faith, the liberal faith of localities and the 
spirit of the conference. Members from the Jewish faith and of 
many denominations would be present. To his mind the diverse 
elements represented seemed an epitome of what the Kingdom of 
Heaven was to be. 


The Conference adjourned to 2 P.M. 


Monpay, November 2d, 1885—-Afternoon Session. 


_ The Conference was called to order at 2:15 p.m. Dr. Stebbins in 
the chair. 

The reports of delegates was announced as the first order of the 
afternoon. 

Reports were presented by Rev. G. H. Greer, of Tacoma, W. T.; 
Rev. Thomas L. Eliot, of Portland, Or.; Rev. A. W. Jackson, of Santa 
Barbara, and Rev. David Cronyn, of San Diego. Rev. Dr. Stebbins 
reported for Los Angeles. 

Rev. David Cronyn then read a paper on “Church Activity;” 


Monpay, November 2d, 1885—Evening Session. 


The Conference was called to order at 8 p.m. Rev. Dr. Stebbins 
in the chair. 

A paper was read by Mr. William C. Bartlett, of the San Francisco 
“Evening Bulletin,” subject: ‘The Relations of the Public Press and 
Religion.” 

Dr. Stebbins expressed the gratitude of the meeting to Mr. Bartlett 
for his very interesting and exhaustive paper. 

The Conference then adjourned to Tuesday morning, at 9:30 A.M. 


Turspay, November 3d, 1885—-Morning Session. 


The Conference was called to order at 9:45 A.M. The President in 
the chair. 

Rev. G. H. Greer conducted the devotional service. 

Mr. Edmond T. Dooley read a paper on the ‘“‘Treatment of Depend: 
ent and Delinquent Children.” 


GENERAL REPORT. 7 


A discussion followed, in which Rev. Mr. Eliot, Rev. Mr. Cronyn, 
Rev. Mr. Woodworth, Mr. Chas. A. Murdock, Mr. J. E. Deakin and 
- others engaged. 

Mr. Murdock offered a resolution regarding a State Board of 
Charities and the general care of dependent and delinquent children. 
Referred to the Committee on Resolutions. 

Mr. Eliot offered a resolution with reference to future Conferences. 
Referred to the Committee on Resolutions. | 

The Conference then adjourned to 2 P.M. 


Turspay, November 3d, 1885—-Afternoon Session. 


The Conference was called to order at 2:10 P.M. Mr. C. A. Mur- 
dock in the chair. 

Rey. Mr. Cronyn, from the Committee on Resolutions, reported 
_ the following : 


Resolved, That we respectfully urge upon the State Commission of Penology 
the importance of embracing in their recommendation to the Legislature the es- 
pecial care of the dependent and delinquent children of the State. 

To us it seems that a State Board of Charities should be constituted, under 
whom visiting agents might place in homes dependent children; and that some 
Reformatory School should be established, that delinquent children should no 
longer be committed to county jails and the State Prisons for discipline or punish- 
ment, or that the provisions of Section 1388 of the Penal Code be so extended 
that private institutions may have adequate control of children committed to 
them for reformation. 

That we urge upon the Commission, after having thoroughly studied the results 
obtained in other communities, to propose such legislation as may give the State 
of California the benefit of the best experience, and place her in the front rank in 
efforts to prevent crime and do justice to the unfortunate children within her 
borders. 


The resolution was unanimously adopted. 

Rev. Mr. Cronyn also reported the following: 

Resolved, That this Conference, before adjournment, appoint a Standing Com- 
mittee of Conference, who may represent Liberal Christian interests and general 
religious work on the Pacific Coast, and to whom may be committed the trust of 
calling subsequent meetings of the Conference, and other duties, during the in- 
tervals between such meetings. Said Standing Committee to be composed of 
eighteen persons, of whom five shall. be a quorum. 


Adopted. 

Rey. Thomas L. Eliot, of Portland, then read a paper on ‘‘The 
Drink Question, in its Different Phases of Total Abstinence, Prohibi- 
tion and Regulation.” 


8 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


The subject was discussed by Rev. Dr. Stebbins, Rev. Mr. Cronyn, 
Messrs. Boyd, Church, Darcy and others. | 
At 4:15 the Conference adjourned to 7:45 P.M. 


TurEspay, November 3d, 1885—-Evening Session. 


The Conference was called to order at 8:10 P.M. President Davis 
in the chair. 

Prof. George H. Howison, Mills Professor of Philosophy in the 
University of California, delivered a very able address, ““On Some of 
the Present Bearings of Philosophy upon Religion.” ; 

After brief remarks by Dr. Stebbins, in the course of which he 
thanked Prof. Howison, on behalf of the Conference, for his address, 
an adjournment was taken to 9:30 Wednesday morning. 


WEDNESDAY, November 4th, 1885—-Morning Session. 


The Conference was called to order at 9:45 a.M. President Davis 
in the chair. 

The devotional service was conducted by Rev. Mr. Eliot. 

Rev. A. W. Jackson read a paper, subject: ‘‘Some Thoughts on 
the Religious Problems of To-day.” 

Brief remarks were made by Rev. Mr. Eliot, Rey. Mr. Greer, Rev. 
Mr. Cronyn, Rev. Mr. Boyd and Mr. Buchanan. 

The Conference adjourned to 2 P.M. 


WEDNESDAY, November 4th, 1885—Afternoon Session. 


The Conference was called to order at 2:15 P.M. President Davis 
in the chair. 

Rabbi Elkan Cohn, of ‘Congregation Emanuel, San Francisco, de- 
livered an address on ‘‘ The Present Position and Future Prospects of 
the Jewish Religion.” 

Dr. Stebbins followed with a paper, subject: ‘‘What is Liberal 
Christianity, and What is the True Type of the Liberal Christian 
Mind?” 

Rev. Mr. Eliot moved that the thanks of the visiting delegates be 
extended to the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco, and to its 
members, for their hospitality during the Conference. 


GENERAL REPORT. 9 


Dr. Stebbins and President Davis desired the Conference to un- 
derstand, in adopting the motion, that the church felt that it, on its 
part, owed a debt of gratitude to the delegates. 

The motion was then carried, and the Conference adjourned at 


7:45 P.M. 


WEDNESDAY, November 4th, 1885—-Evening Session. 


The Conference was called to order at 8 p.m. President Davis in 
the chair. 
The President stated the subject for the evening session to be the 
general consideration of the Liberal outlook. 
_ Short addresses were made by Rev. Mr. Eliot, Rev. Mr. Cronyn, 
Mr. Chas. A. Murdock, Rev. Mr. Greer, Mr. J. E. Deakin and Mr. 
G. E. Church. 
Mr. Murdock offered the following resolution : 
Resolved, That a Publication Committee of three members be appointed by 
the President, who shall expend, at their discretion, any sums of money which 
they shall receive for that purpose, in publishing and distributing the proeeedings 
of the Conference; that all interested in the end sought are invited to contribute 


freely, that a full report of the papers read and the other proceedings of the Con- 
ference may be preserved and widely disseminated. 


Carried. 

The President appointed Mr. Chas. A. Murdock, Mr. A. S. Halli- 
die and Mr. L. H. Bonestell as such Committee. 

The President then announced the following Committee of Confer- 
ence: 
Rev. T. L. Exrot, of Portland, Oregon; Mr. THos. VARNEY, of Oakland; 


Mr. E. L. Smiru, of Portland, Oregon; Mrs. L, H. WATKINS, of San Jose; 
Mr. C. W. BuRRAGE, of Portland, Oregon; Mrs. G. E. Kirsy, of Santa Cruz; 


Mr. H. P. Isaacs, of Walla Walla; G. E. Cuurcu, Esq., of Fresno; 
Rev. G. H. GREER, of Tacoma; Rev. HORATIO STEBBINS, of S. F.; 
Rev. ELI Fay, of Los Angeles; Hon. Horace Davis, of S. F.; , 
Rev. A. W. JACKSON, of Santa Barbara; Mr. L. H. BONESTELL, of S. F.; 
Rev. DAVID CRONYN, of San Diego; Mrs.\A. G. SOULE, of So F.: 


Rev. CuHas. P. MAssrey, of Sacramento; Mr, CHas. A. MuRDOCK, of S. F. 


The thanks of the Conference were tendered to President Davis for 
the able manner in which he had performed his duties. 

Dr. Stebbins reviewed, in a brief address, the work of the Confer- 
ence and of Liberal Christianity. 

The Conference then adjourned szne die. 


oA POOL BR Re Lita Cea de 


ADDRESS OF HON. HORACE DAVIS, OF SAN FRANCISCO. 


Ladies and Gentlemen, Delegates and Other Friends of the Liberal 
Faith:—We have met to confer upon the best interests of the Liberal 
Christian faith, to compare our thoughts and our experience, to see 
how we can advance that faith which has been so dear to us, and 
has done so much for us, that we would gladly offer it to every man 
failing to find comfort and rest in the old theologies. 

Some of us have come from the very ends of the land, from the 
farthest verge of our country, both North and South, echoing the 
same cry, bearing witness to the hunger and thirst for a freer, a more 
rational, more practical form of Christian faith. 

We are not here to mold any formula of faith which shall be the 
password of membership, nor to shape any dogma nor declare any 
creed. ‘The characteristic test of our communion is rather a method 
of religious thought, a tone of religious faith, than a dogma crystal- 
lized into permanent form. As the human mind is plastic, as every 
genuine lover of truth is always ready to receive, so we shrink from 
having any rigid statements of belief imposed upon us. All we ask 
of the Christian who seeks our communion is that his attitude be 
reverent and free; that he stand with uncovered head in the presence 
of the Almighty, but with his soul open like the flower of the field 
to every influence from above that may fall upon it, whether it be the 
beams of the great sun by day or the earthly dews by night. 

There is a large body of men in every Christian community who 
find no satisfaction in the old statements of belief. In the olden 
time, when all education and all thought was shut up in the church, 
its fiat was enough to establish the standard of faith. But that period 
has long gone by; universal education and free thought have 
brought a broader humanity, and with it new responsibilities. The 
thinking man of to-day shrinks from accepting views of God’s deal- 
ings with men, which gave no trouble to his fathers, and he asks why 


THE LIBERAL FAITH. II 


God’s mercy and providence, as expressed in the creeds, should be of 
so different a quality from what He has planted in His human chil- 
dren; why man’s salvation should depend on the acceptance of mys- 
teries which imagination cannot fathom, and which are repugnant to 
his reason. 

To hold this increasing body of men to the standard of Christianity 
requires a new adjustment of religious beliefs, a restatement of faith 
on a new basis, which shall reconcile Christianity as far as possible to 
that earnest spirit of inquiry which aims to bring all our knowledge of 
God’s ways into one system of harmonious action, based upon the 
belief that though God’s ways are higher than our ways, His eternal 
laws must move in the same orbit as the grand principles of justice, 
truth and love, which He has given us to guide our action here. We 
may not fathom the mysteries of Infinity, but we can hope to recon- 
cile our views of God’s providence with our innate sense of these 
principles, and to recast our statements of belief so as to bring them 
into rational harmony with our sense of right. 

This want Liberal Christianity tries to meet. The weary soul that 
cannot accept the old theologies may find shelter here; instead of 
being driven out into the bleak and barren realm of skepticism, here 
he may hope to find a comforting and a rational faith. Not 
that we claim to solve the problems of the spirit, or to make clear 
all the dark questions of human life, but our views of religion sim- 
plify them and bring them nearer to the apprehension of man’s 
reason. 

When we approach the mysteries of Infinity we veil our eyes in 
awful reverence. We know nothing of the mystery of the Trinity. 
We say, with Paul: ‘To us, there is but one God, the Father.” We 
can call Him our Father in Heaven, for we believe He requires no 
sacrifice to reconcile Him to us, but that He is always ready to re- 
ceive us when we come to ourselves and determine to seek Him. 
Nay, more, He comes out to meet His erring child, and rejoices 
that he is coming home once more. 

Jesus to us is the Son of man, our loving brother, the ideal of hu- 
manity, dwelling ever in the very presence of God, to whom spiritual 
truths were things of sight and not of speculation; whose life was spent 
for the good of others, and whose death was not a sacrifice to appease 
the wrath of God, but the culmination of a devoted life. Salvation 
to us is salvation from sin itself, and not from its punishment. There- 
fore, it must be won by the struggle against sin, and the perfection of 


I2 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


character. The punishment of sin, we believe, is not inflicted to 
satisfy the wrath of God nor the majesty of His law, but in mercy for 
our correction, to bring us back to our spiritual home from which we 
are straying; and so we cannot believe in e/ervza/ punishment, but if 
the chastisement is effectual, and is followed by repentance, we think, 
God will always be ready to receive the sinner. 

In this way we seek to readjust the so-called ‘‘scheme of redemp- 
tion” in terms more in harmony with our ideas of justice and mercy, 
and remold dogmatic Christianity into a more reasonable and hu- 
mane system of belief. Thus religious thought, freed from ecclesias- 
tical shackles, treads with a freer step, with more lithe, elastic motion. 
So, too, religious life, no longer confined to monk, or nun, or church 
of any kind, descends upon the people and spreads through the com- 
mon life, everywhere fruiting in good works, yielding ‘some thirty, 
some sixty, some an hundred fold.” 

The Sabbath day, in the olden time, was exclusively the Lord’s 
Day. The old hymn said, ‘This is the day the Lord hath made, 
He calls the hours his own.” The new faith regards the other six 
days of the week as equally consecrated to the work of the Lord—nay, 
more so, for it is far easier to worship God in the sanctuary one day 
in seven, than it is to obey His law in the office, the counting-room, 
the home and the street, for the other six. The temptations and trials 
of common life need the hallowing influence of religion far more than 
the peaceful repose of Sunday. 

There was a time when the church was holy ground and all the 
world else was unsanctified. To us all places are holy. ‘The hour 
cometh,” said Jesus to the woman by the well, ‘‘ when ye shall worship 
the Father neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem.” ‘The 
narrow limitation of a local sanctity cannot contain the spirit of God. 
The fountain overflows its bounds and waters the dry regions of secu- 
lar life. ‘‘ The hour cometh and now is when the true worshippers 
shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth,” not inside the sanc- 
tuary only, but in every place where the spirit and the truth can work 
for the Kingdom of God. 

With us the Kingdom of Heaven is not postponed to some distant 
period, or to another world, but men should seek it here and now, as 
the pearl of great price, for which the merchant may sell all he hath 
and buy it. The field, said Jesus, is the world. The seed should be 
planted now, and it will spring up and bear fruit—first the blade, then 
the ear, then the full corn in the ear, Thus we try to make the reali: 


THE LIBERAL. FAITH. 13 


ties of religion matters of every-day life. The current of religious 
thought and life we would turn from narrow ecclesiastical channels, 
and spread it over the broad field of home-life and work-day pursuits, 
where it may fertilize the dry cares of this world, and make the desert 
blossom as the rose. Such I conceive to be the functions of Liberal 
Christianity, to become a practical work-day fertilizer of common life, 
to turn religion from its specialized limits, from the narrow channels 
in which the church has sought to limit its power, and pour it broadcast 
over the whole field of human life. 

If we have any right to exist as a special body in the Christian 
church, it must be by some positive, active influence for the good of 
humanity. The day of negations has gone by. The protest against 
the old theologies has been made and sustained. We have acquired 
our foothold, and have sustained it as against the religious thought of 
the old churches. We have a glorious record of saints and apostles 
of the new faith, the fathers of the new church, who shaped the mold 
in which the new thought was formed. Many of these have passed 
on, leaving us to harvest the fruit of their labors. If the field which 
they have conquered can bring us nothing but cold negations, then 
their labors, as well as ours, would be in vain. Butit is not so. The 
Liberal Church has everywhere been fruitful in good works. Its 
leading men have been leaders not only in thought but in action. 
Channing, Parker, Bellows, May, Starr King, Mayo, and a host of 
others, have borne witness to the power of the Liberal faith, its power 
unto life, rich, fruitful human life, and the world is better for their 
labors. ‘‘ By their works ye shall know them,” for they have helped 
to plant the kingdom of God among men. 

Not that we should neglect the spiritual elements of religion, the 
elements of worship and aspiration. If there be any new strength in 
a simpler faith and a purer worship, these should be ours, too, but the 
special function of the Liberal faith to-day, I conceive to be, to infuse 
the work-day life of men with the spirit of Christ, and to draw to his 
standard those who cannot march under the banners of the old the- 
ologies, but yet are willing to acknowledge the spirit of Christ, and 
advance the cause of charity, humanity and love among suffering 
men and women. 

Wherever this gospel has been preached in our midst it has met 
a willing response. It is the lack of men to lead and not of willing 
followers that has checked our advance. Still the progress has been 
much greater than our numerical strength would imply. Liberal 


I4 PACIFIC COAST ‘CONFERENCE, 


thought has reacted on the old theologies; their sharp corners have 
been rubbed down; sometimes the creeds themselves are softened, 
and generally the preacher of to-day lays far less stress than he did a 
generation ago on those points at variance with human life and human 
experience. The world’s thought is everywhere advancing toward 
more rational and humane views of God and His dealings with men. 

The longer I live and the more I see of the workings of the Liberal 
faith in society, the stronger becomes my conviction that Christian 
theology must assume this form if it is to retain its hold upon men. 

It is a return to the simple faith of the Great Master, whose won- 
derful life has been the inspiration and guide and consolation of hu- 
manity through so many ages. 

If we cling to Him and make our faith like His, one of service 
and aspiration, service to man and aspiration to God, faith and works 
will be blended in one, and we shall realize the perfect Christian doc- 
-trine and the highest Christian life. 


RoC ere Coal VE LLY’, 


ADDRESS BY REV. DAVID CRONYN, OF SAN DIEGO. 


The church is the depository and channel of the spirit; not exclus- 
ively so, but distinctively, providentially and historically so. Its 
office is twofold: First, the enthronement of the spirit in the congre- 
gation; second, the diffusion of the spirit from congregational centers 
through the social organization. - . 


1. First, the primary and immediate work of the church lies in 
quickening the divine consciousness of the individual, in making 
man the conscious, as he is already the unconscious, child of Heaven. 
The individual congregation is the field where are cultivated the 
fruits of the spirit, as love, peace, gentleness, goodness; faith, hope 
and charity, worship, aspiration and ideal life. Sunday worship is 
properly the baptism of men with spirit and with fire. To go “to 
meeting,” as the old New England phrase had it, is to re-climb the 
mountain and receive again from the hands of God the everlasting 
decalogue; is to hear once more the Sermon on the Mount. The 
church-goer should behold the eternal vision, be rekindled by fire 
from Heaven, in his weekly ascension of 


‘* The great world’s altar-stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God.” 


So primarily the work of the church is the cultivation of spiritual 
life in its individual congregations. The highest activity of any con- 
gregation is its self-activity, its self-spzr¢twal activity; the spiritualiza- 
tion of its own fold, of all who dwell within its borders or breathe its 
atmosphere. 


2. But now a center of force is a center of radiating force. As 
the sun in the solar system, so a Christian congregation in society. 
It is not only a center of energy, but properly a d¢stributing center. 
It is not simply a recipient of the spirit of God; it is an official, a 
steward of that spirit. Its cardinal and comprehensive virtue is the 
one so profoundly emphasized by its progenitor—the principle of 


16 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


love. Love is irrepressible, contagious, diffusive. It is a full foun-— 
tain, which will not stay where it is born, but in its fullness pours 
Over, runs out and on, fertilizing where it goes. It is a mountain 
spring, filled by the upland rains of Heaven, descending by its own 
gravity, pouring down upon the lowlands, watering with its full flood 
all arid wastes; bearing on its bosom rich freights for all the dwellers 
by the stream side. Is divine love in this man or that? It is if it is 
beheld pouring out of him upon other men in some tangible shape of 
sympathy and helpfulness. Is the God-spirit in this congregation or 
that? It assuredly is if such a congregation is an active, flowing 
well of humanity. In short, any healthy congregational activity is ex- 
ternal as well as internal. 


Now, the spirit, working in definite channels, has various correlated 
forms of activity. First, there is the search for truth—the upward 
flight of the soul. Second, there is loyalty to ethics—life’s practical 
recognition of the imperative claims of truth. Third, there is human- 
ity—man’s sympathetic treatment of man. The comprehensive mode 
of the church includes this three-fold action of the spirit: Truth, 
which touches the head; ethics, which touches the conscience; 
humanity, which touches the heart. Within its own fold, and then 
in society, the church must foster first the spirit of truth, which guides 
to all truth; second, the ethics, 


‘* The virtues which shine aloft like stars,” 


Third, 


‘“ The charities which soothe and heal and bless.” 


Considering here the third external activity, we assume that the 
charities of each church belong primarily to its own household; sec- 
ondarily, to the world. In the world at large, what are the scope and 
limits of charitable energy? What shall it do? How much shall it 
do? What is imperative, and what is optional? It ought not and 
cannot take hold of everything that may claim its attention or its 
sympathy even. Its energies cannot fill the scope of its sympathies. 
While the field of human necessity is its general field, I should say 
that the external practical activities of the church lie in the direction, 
not of indiscriminate human want, but of pressing, imperative, imme- 
diate human want; wants of the dependent and perishing; wants of 
the unfortunate, the poor, the helpless; wants that the State will not 
or does not attend to—that civic and secular organizations overlook; 


CHURCH ACTIVITY. 7 


wants of hunger, nakedness, disease and sickness, ignorance and vice, 
whose existence and claims the church, as heir of the 


*¢ Strong Son of God, immortal Son,” 


must instinctively recognize and relieve. Under this classification, 
there are three various wants—bodily, mind and moral. 

With reference to all social ills, the first outside duty of the church 
is to inspire the State with the spirit of helpfulness, energize it with 
love. Thanks to the growing benevolence of legislation, the State is 
more and more anticipating the extreme exigencies of humanity with 
its State education, public hospitals, asylums, reform schools, orphan 
homes, etc. But there is a large marginal field which the State can- 
not occupy, or is slow to occupy, and which the church must hold 
provisionally or permanently. To this department belong, for 
example, industrial-unions, night-schools, country-week, coffee-rooms, 
flower-missions, boys-and-girls-aid societies and charity kindergartens, 
children’s hospitals, etc. 

Every pressing unmet want of body, mind or morals must be pro- 
visionally or permanently met by the warm heart, intelligent head 
and ready hand of the church. 

But now there is a class of benevolent interests to which the reli- 
gious organizations should address its most powerful energy. The 
serious defect of charity is its devotion to amelioration, its neglect of 
prevention. No captain of a vessel, with a great hole stove in the 
bottom, would keep his sailors eternally at the pumps while he sailed 
and sailed. He would speedily send his carpenters below with 
instructions to stop up that hole. We have sailed long enough with 
great holes in the bottom of our social ship. Long enough have we 
kept our benevolent sailors at the pumps. It is time to stop up those 
big leaks. The church, in common with the State, must throw itself 
with greater energy into the work of preventive charity. In this direc- 
tion it must take hold of the work of child-saving. 


First, the value of the Boys and Girls Aid Societies can hardly be 
over-estimated. The youth reached by these institutions are society’s 
embryotic dependents and delinquents, its prospective hoodlums, so- 
cial outcasts, paupers and criminals. Shall we take them in the plas- 
tic, primitive stage, or wait until they are hardened and hopeless ? 
Shall we manipulate them while in solution, or wait until they are 
crystallized in insoluble habits of thriftlessness, vice and crime? 

I need not answer that question. And yet Church and State both 


18 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. : 


are very largely occupied with the latter methods,—methods against 
which true charity, as well as social science, stoutly remonstrate. Let 
us save the vicious, homeless, friendless boys and girls. “Let us make 
their youth the fulcrum of social salvation. Every religious congre- 


gation in this city, every religious congregation in this State, ought to © 


unite in a hearty, moral and pecuniary support of the Boys and Girls 
Aid Society of San Francisco. 


Second. But the child is father to the youth as well as to the man. 
A still larger leak in our vessel is stopped up by the beautiful and 
beneficient charity of the free kindergarten. What munificent possi- 
bilities are contained in that little, growing tree! ‘Take every little 
child in this country from the haunts and horrors of poverty, filth and 
disease, shame, vice and crime,—take every such little child and put 
it amidst comfort, cleanliness, sunshine, refinement and cheer, faith, 
hope and love for several hours a day for the first five years of its life,— 
the period which Lord Brougham says determines the destiny of the 
child—do this, for, say, three successive generations, and what would 
be the effect upon that sense of social ills whieh now presses so heavily 
upon our modern life? I do not know, whether or not, the free kin- 
dergarten is adequate to all the demands of the problem; but it is, 
self-evidently, a long, long step in the right direction ; in the direction 
of natural law; in the direction of a wise, religious and political 
economy ; in the direction of humane effort, economically invested, 
and human love unwasted and remunerated. 

I am not sure but the State ought to reach out an autocratic arm, 
and seize every child and youth going to destruction, and place it, 
nolens volens, under the ministrations of an educated and systematized 
love. But since, neither autocratically nor democratically, is the State 
ready to do something of this kind, the church, as an official of the 
tender humanity, enjoined by its divine Leader, ought to take hold of 
child-saving, and keep hold, until the State comes to itself, and lends 
its mighty, powerful energies to the work of child-saving, as a work of 


self-preservation. ‘To this beneficent charity, too, every church in this 


State, inspired by the spirit of Christ, should give a generous, moral 
and moneyed support. | 

But the most effective stoppage of the great leak in our vessel is 
identified with a theoretic movement. ‘That is the temperance agita- 
tion. “ Intemperance,” as it is popularly termed, is, by unanimous 
and universal consent, the Pandora’s box of modern gociety. From 
it escape all the miseries of society. By it every virtue is lost, save 


CHURCH ACTIVITY. 19 


hope. With specific methods of temperance action, I do not here 
deal. I only urge the sacred, the imperative importance of church 
interest in this reform. Religious temperance activity may go wrong 
at times, but better a zealous mistake in behalf of human weal than 
any conventional insensibility to human woe, and. especially to such 
_ tragic, such awful woe, as follows in the wake of this cyclonic evil. 
To the happy solution of this question, Church and State need now 
to address themselves almost exclusively, until this most formidable 
leak in our vessel is effectually stopped... There is, there always will 
be, a grim irony in our treatment of the detailed evils of society while 
this, their powerful, parental cause, remains active. 

In this warfare with common evils, the method of associated action 
must be utilized by the church. Christian union, not the traditional 
unchristian disunion. ‘The enemy has been long enough defeating 
_us by detachments. Now let the detachments unite and mass their 
forces. I hail with joy the Church Congresses which for a few days, 
at least, level the theological barbed wire fences, and make common 
fellowship, in the inclusive spirit of truth, welcome the associated 
charities, not only for its economies of a precious force, but, likewise, 
for its realization, in advance, of a high religious ideal, its supremacy 
of the heart over the head, humanity over theology, spirit over letter. 
The supreme ends of philanthropic endeavor are economic and moral, 
and not theological at all. Methods of reaching those ends must cor- 
respond. Among themselves, let the individual theologies maintain a 
friendly rivalry, if they will, but out in the world, fighting a common 
foe, let the truce of God fall upon them all, while they unite to defeat 
and destroy social evils which are a perpetual menace to the virtue, 
prosperity and security of society. 

But amidst all centrifugal activities, we must not lose sight of the 
centripetal actzvzty. The original work of che church is the storage of 
a spiritual energy, which of its own gray tation seeks distribution in 
every form of beneficent action. Let us not forget that: First, the 
birth in congregational centers of the God-spirit, the soul of activity 
precedes special forms of activity. The church is primarily concerned 
with principles. Science furnishes the methods. Social science itself, 
this new evangel of radical relief and remedy, reaches dignity and 
efficiency only as it responds to the divine love which goes up to the 
highest and out tothe lowest. Questions of capital and labor, wealth 
and poverty, vice and crime, are questions most largely of moral 
economy first and political economy afterwards. Not in land tenure, 


20 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


but in moral tenure, lies the most responsible element of social mis- 
chief; not in capital, or corporation, or wealth, or pleasure, but in 
the temper of these, intrinsically. They are guiltless. ‘Their wrong 
comes of the coarse, the unmoral energy which inspires them. Every 
law of the land should be an expression of the spirit of God. The 
multiplication table itself needs spiritualizing. 

Just here the church incurs a serious risk. Amidst its external 
activities, amidst the crowding world: there is danger that it may un- 
consciously vacate its original and legitimate office as the center of. a 
divine creative and formative force. It must watch itself. It must 
keep a large, open. communication with its base of spiritual supply ; 
else, how can it supply the world? If it have not the breath of life, 
how can it kindle life under the ribs of moral death? In the moral 
world it can be a central sun of light and heat, only as it is perpetu- 
ally renewed by the external meteoric showers of the Infinite Spirit. 


THE RELATION OF THE PRESS TO 
RELIGION. 


ADDRESS BY MR. WILLIAM C. BARTLETT. 


There was a time when the world got along well enough without 
the newspaper. It was not essential to the well being of primitive 
communities. The craving for news might have been as strong then 
as it is now. It was sought eagerly in the market-places. The 
Athenians were eager to hear or tell some new thing. The discussion 
of philosophy and religion needed the by-play and zest occasionally 
_ of news. The poet was a wandering minstrel, reciting his poems on 
the street-corners, or wherever he could find a small group to listen to 
him. No doubt Homer gave recitations of the Odyssey and of the 
Illiad on many a street, and was glad of the obolus which was quietly 
dropped into his hand by some admiring listener. When there was 
no news to satisfy the cravings of men, poets and story-tellers created 
news. ‘They drew from an ideal world what they could not find in a 
real one. In some respects the ideal news was the best. Had there 
been newspapers at that time, either the fortunes of Ulysses would 
never have been told in story or song, or 1f told, the hashed report 
next morning would have driven the minstrel to madness and suicide. 
When no ideal or real news was accessible, we may infer that com- 
munities were overmuch given to gossip, small-talk and prattle. It 
was needful that there should be some attrition with the world,—that 
its daily ongoings should pass from one to another as a sort of mild 
electric shock,—as a relief withal, from the utter stagnation of life. 
The Egyptians recorded the great events which most concerned 
them on obelisks, a kind of illustrated newspaper in granite; and the 
lesser incidents of individual life were often written upon sheets of 
papyrus or linen and wound around the bodies of the dead,—a wise 
proceeding perhaps, since it is often better that one’s record should be 
buried with him than that it should be given to the world. ‘That which 
was made public had been prepared by Kings and rulers in their 


ae PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


own way, and their way was to omit all the evil deeds and record 
the good ones. But the modern newspaper, being so much the child 
of Democracy; it records rather what the masses are doing, so that 
the individual—the private citizen—is often more particularly noticed 
than Kings and Emperors. And yet however imperfect the repre- 
sentation of some phases of life may be, it is in some respects the 
best, because the newspaper tells how the very pulse of the world 
beats from day to day. It masses materials for history, so that no 
good history of any modern epoch could be written without drawing 
from newspaper sources where the current events of each day have 
been recorded. The best account of the late civil war, the most 
stupendous series of events in the history of the nation, is probably 
yet to be found in the newspaper correspondence of that period. All 
the great movements of the time, battles lost and won, retreats, ad- 
vances, capitulations, and whatsoever entered in and became a part of 
that mighty struggle, was photographed as it were, by the pen of the 
newspaper correspondent on the spot. The smoke and the grime of 
the conflict was upon him. The inspiration of the hour was in him. 
He was eyes and ears for millions of people. And so when his 
senses did not deceive him, he got at the very soul of things and 
brought home to all the firesides of the land the dreadful realism of 
war—the one picture surpassing all others for its vividness and truth. 
What would the world not give to-day for a file of newspapers discov- 
ered in some crypt or tomb of Herculaneum or Pompeii? What 
treasures of recovered history would be there? From that hour we 
should know the thoughts, the life and aspirations of these long en- 
tombed cities, whose record even has perished with them. One can 
hardly read Czesar’s Commentaries, especially of his conquests in 
Gaul and Britain, without wishing that the great warrior had had a 
newspaper correspondent to prod him, and to publish the whole 
truth instead of a small part of it. Writing his own history, he is a 
more symmetrical character than Napoleon, because the latter lived 
within the cycle of the journals which recorded daily events; and he 
could not strike from the record’ anything which was distasteful to 
him. If the unveracious historian, under the glamor of this modern 
Ceesar, left out important events, they were kept in'pickle, awaiting 
the coming historian, who reverenced truth more than he did the de- 
stroyers of men. When the battle of Waterloo was fought, the great 
war correspondent had not then appeared Yet one cannot even now 
read the accounts which appeared in the newspapers of that time 








THE PRESS AND RELIGION, 23 


without feeling something of the dreadful shock when the solid earth 
trembled under the wheeling squadrons, and half the world seemed 
to hang on the issue of the hour. There was no telegraph then to 
girdle the earth and to whisper news in the ears of the multitude, and 
no network of railroads over which the swift dragons sped their way 
with wheels of thunder and eyes of flame. The courier leaped upon 
his relay of horses, flying by night and by day, with his government 
despatches, and the great bankers who through private enterprise 
could get the news an hour ahead of its publicity, could go into the 
market and make millions. 

The modern newspaper was born out of a new condition. It has 
come by a process of physical and mental evolution which has been 
going on, notably, during the last fifty years, and is going on to-day, 
the end of which the wisest cannot forecast. It has brought in the 
hundred-ton rifled cannon, against which no fort upon the land can 
stand; it has brought in the swift iron-clad battery on the sea, a single 
one of which would have swept the Spanish Armada out of existence 
in half an hour. It has brought in the torpedo boat dealing its 
dreadful missiles under the deep—the very incarnation of diabolical 
force—letting the great iron-ciad fall into the caverns of the sea with 
its men and munitions, as if it were no more than a toy upon the 
waters. ‘The railroads span continents and the swift steamships vex 
all waters. Fifty years ago the merchant heard from a distant com- 
mercial port perhaps once in six months; now he steps into his back- 
office, or across the way, and may hear from every great commercial 
port in the world between sun and sun. Engineers have hung metal 
bridges in the air across the broadest and swiftest rivers, and across 
this filagree, which looks like a spider’s web, rush the black demons 
to and fro, as if weaving new threads into the web of fate. They cut 
in two continents for steamships, and go under the highest mountains 
as if it were a very little thing. One might pause reverently to enquire, 
What hath God wrought? What is the highest significance of this 
marvelous evolution going on under our eyes? And are these 
mighty forces to be marshaled for the good of humanity, or are they 
to be used to oppress it as never before under the whole heavens? 
Knowledge runs toand fro, but what is the knowledge; and the spirit 
of the living thing creature is in the wheels of the printing-press, but 
what is the spirit? . 

Now the modern newspaper is the outcome of all these forces. It 
ranks as one of them. It has a prodigious power for good or evil. 


24 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


It comes to meet an apparent want of human society. It belongs 
to the sociology of the times. The community declares it to bea 
necessity. It will have it for better or for worse. In some form it 
enters into nearly every house. It is sought because in its best estate 
it brings to one’s threshold the history of the world for one day. ‘The 
community will have that history, imperfect as it may be. It will 
know how the world is going for this day, and for every day. That 
is one of the cravings of modern society, and even though it were a 
morbid one, there is no other cure for it but to supply the very 
thing it craves. Now, this thing which society has created, and which 
it could extinguish at any time, but which it never will, which comes 
to our thresholds, bidden or unbidden, which enters in and claims 
the honors of a guest, which is spread before our children, and so 
becomes an educational force of some sort, concerns us as to its 
character, its influence, its power for good or evil—its present help- 
fulness or hindrance and its future possibilities in right and wrong 
directions. 


It is recorded that seventy years after the landing of the Pilgrims 
on Plymouth Rock, and two hundred and fifty years after the inven- 
tion of printing, a newspaper was issued in that colony—it lived one 
day. But seventeen years later, on the 25th day of September, 1690, 
Richard Pierce of Boston, began to publish a newspaper in that 
town, called the ews Letter. It was about 11 inches long by 7 
inches broad. The prospectus 1s worthy of notice. It sets out the 
scope and functions of a newspaper with a frankness and intelligent 
comprehension of what society needed two hundred years ago, which 
has not been surpassed by any modern journal. 


“It is designed that the country shall be furnished once a month 
(or if any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener), with an account of 
such considerable things as have arrived under our notice. 


“In order hereunto, the publisher will take what pains he can to 
obtain a faithful Relation of all such things; and will particularly 
make himself beholden to such Persons in Boston whom he knows 
to have been for their own use the diligent Observers of such 
matters. 


“That which is herein proposed, is, First, zat Memorable Occur- 
rents of Divine Providence may not be neglected or forgotten, as 
they often are. Secondly, that people every where may better under- 
stand the Circumstances of Publique Affairs, both abroad and at 


THE PRESS AND RELIGION. 25 


home; which may not only direct their thoughts at all times, but at 
some times also to assist their Business and Negotiations. 

“Thirdly. That some thing may be done towards the Curing, or 
at least, the Charming of that Spirit of Lying, which prevails among 
us, wherefore, nothing shall be entered, but what we have reason to 
believe is true, repairing to the best fountains for our Information. 
And when there appears any material mistake in any thing that is 
collected, it shall be corrected in the next. 

‘Moreover, the Publisher of these Occurrences is willing to engage, 
that whereas, there are many False Reports, maliciously made, and 
spread among us, if any well minded person will be at the pains to 
trace any such false Reports, so faras to find out and Convict the 
First Raiser of it, he will in this paper (unless just Advice be given 
to the contrary), expose the name of such person, as a malicious 
Raiser of a False Report. It is supposed that none will dislike this 
Proposal, but such as intend to be guilty of so villainous a crime.” 

If the first newspaper in the country issued nearly two hundred 
years ago for the purpose of “‘curing or charming away the spirit of 
lying,” had a right inspiration and correct aims, it might be well to 
enquire whether the modern newspaper has not in too many instances 
fallen away from that standard and become a most prolific source of 
fiction and falsehood? ‘The instances are exceptional, and do not 
apply to the greater number of journals, any more than the vice of 
lying and malicious misrepresentation which is never wholly cured, 
applies to the greater number instead of the smaller part of the com- 
munity. Yet that smaller part will have its newspaper representation 
just as surely as the larger one. It will be in sympathy with the 
publisher who loveth and maketh a lie. It will gloat over his sensa- 
tion mongering, his blackguardism, his personal assaults, his indecent 
garnishment and parade of society scandals. Do you wonder how 
papers of this class live and prosper? ‘They live because they have a 
constituency which supports them. And they could not live without 
that constituency. Let it be understood, therefore, that communities 
make their newspapers—that is, they furnish the conditions, and very 
largely, their characters. Putting the proposition in a more realistic 
way, the community creates the market. There never was a sheet so 
bad that it did not find buyers in the market. So, then, when excep- 
tion is taken to the character of particular journals, it is an exception 
as well to that part of the community which supports such papers. 
If it wanted better ones, it would have them. The demand creates, 


26 PACIFIC \COAST “CONFERENCE, 


sooner or later, the supply. Because whatever else there may be 
about a newspaper of an institutional character, it has also a com- 
mercial or marketable feature. It is a commodity in this business 
aspect, made to sell, as boots, shoes, hats and flour are made to sell. 

But when the first rank has been once attained, or even a grade 
below, the journal is something more than a mere commodity to be 
sold as a grocer sells sugar. It then becomes an institution. Its 
value consists not in the number of daily and weekly issues which 
can be sold, but in its character, its power to influence and represent 
public opinion ; not that opinion which is generated in the slums and 
purlieus of the city, but the opinions which the intelligent men and 
women are forming and which finally come to be the accepted and 
controlling social, political and moral convictions of the community. 
It is then as distinctly an institution as a school or a seminary, or a 
college. And this relation to the public is not materially modified 
because the property interest is limited to three or four men. Ina 
broader sense, it belongs to society. They have contributed to build 
it—have paid money year in and year out to sustain it—and when 
they cease to pay their money in this way it ceases to exist, just as 
the private school, the academy or the college without special endow- 
ments, would cease to exist whenever the public favor was withdrawn. 
Now, the newspaper does not reach this condition of an institution, 
wherein its highest value consists in the fact that it is an organ of 
puplic opinion, without integrity of conduct and character—truthful- 
ness, independence of all low and sordid considerations affecting its 
control—such downright honesty and fair dealing that none of its 
opinions nor editorial statements can ever be bought or sold. 

Some months ago the conductor of a weekly journal of consider- 
able prominence in this city—a journal much given to the discussion 
of questions of social and political reform—took the ground that it 
was perfectly right for a newspaper to sell its editorial opinions, that 
it was a legitimate matter of business; and that no journal could be 
damaged when charged with business transactions of that nature. 
This confusion of ideas, the lack of any moral or legal conception of 
responsibility, whether uttered in a newspaper or on the bench, chal- 
_ lenges the sharpest criticism. The public journal which has attained 
a respectable standing has contracted to deal with the public in 
absolute good faith. If it does otherwise it commits a fraud upon 
the public and is itself a printed fraud. Putting the newspaper 
on the lowest ground of a commercial article and dropping out its 


THE PRESS AND RELIGION. a7 


institutional character, the goods delivered ought to be genuine, and 
not adulterated and base compounds. Ina mock auction store, the 
buyer dealing with a charlatan and a knave, must expect to be 
cheated. He will get pinchbeck instead of gold. But dealing with 
men of good character and established reputation, he does not expect 
the cheats, the shams and the morals of a mock auction concern. 
The grocer keeps faith with his customers. If he puts sand in the 
sugar and dead forest leaves in his tea, his customers leave him. 
They will have none of his bogus goods. The lawyer must keep 
faith with his clients. If he does not, he becomes a shyster. The 
judge must deliver honest opinions, uninfluenced by fear or favor. 
His contract with the public is that he will never sell an opinion, 
while he occupies that exalted place. Were it known that he did 
otherwise, he would encounter a righteous public indignation ending 
in impeachment. The minister of religion contracts to utter the 
truth as it shall be revealed, in the honor of God and the love of 
men. He may not be a hypocrite, nor a liar, nor a mountebank, nor 
a worshipper of the god Dagon. The teacher contracts to instruct 
his pupils not only in technical knowledge, but as far as may be, to 
influence their future lives by an example of truth, honor and un- 
questioned faithfulness and integrity. The shipmaster receives his 
freight and his passengers under a contract which reaches over to the 
public, that he will commit no act of barratry or piracy, but by the 
sun at midday, and the stars by night, and the favor of that God who 
is above them, he will bring them all safely into port. By what 
principle of ethics and by what law of human accountability are these 
classes of men held to the highest standard of duty, and the con- 
ductors of public journals absolved from all obligation to deal 
honestly with the public? If the tradesman commits a fraud he is 
either criminally prosecuted, or he loses the patronage of the public. 
When Samson, the financial editor of the London Z7mes, was thought 
to have profited in an illegitimate way by certain articles he had 
written, jndgment fell on him like lightning. Nothing could save 
him. ‘The proprietors of that great journal would not tolerate the 
suspicion that their financial editor could deal fraudulently with the 
public. Now, besides the written law, there is the unwritten law of 
commercial and financial honor. It is at the foundation of all the im- 
portant business transactions of the world. Beyond all the security 
of statutes and courts, is the greater security derived from faith in the 
honor of men. The loss of that confidence would insure bankruptcy 


28 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


and ruin throughout the civilized world. Now, back of this com- 
mercial conscience is the religious conscience—a conviction that 
human rectitude is a principle of divine obligation, and that some- 
where in this world or the next an all-embracing equity operates 
against every wrong. In the earlier days of the anti-slavery excite- 
ment the commercial conscience, which had been divorced from a 
religious conscience, sneered and mocked at this recognition of the 
higher law. But when the religious conscience began to work, a 
revolution was as certain as that God ruled above the tumult of 
nations. Fiery fanaticism on one side, and muddy conservatism upon 
the other neither hastened nor delayed the steady march in that 
exodus from slavery to freedom. ‘There never has been a revolution 
in the world which brought any substantial good to humanity that 
did not have back of it a religious conscience. When the nihilist 
abolishes God, by resolution, and then blindly smites for the release 
of men from their burdens, you see nothing but black and bloody 
streaks along the horizon. There is no sun-burst, nor even a faint 
line of light marking a rift in the cloud. Humanity has never been 
helped by an attempt to abolish the God of Humanity. What is 
most needed to-day is a business conscience touched, as it were, by 
the finger of God, until all the lines of human duty and obligation 
are seen to run parallel with the highest interests of men. 

Now, by the creation of new and surprising facilities for obtaining 
news and other information, the secular press has come to touch 
nearly every human interest. It does not so much lead public opin- 
ion as to voice that which has already been created; for the average 
newspaper conductor is no more capable of leading public opinion 
than the average merchant or mechanic. He has a machine by which 
he can gather up all the threads of floating opinion, and show to 
some extent what the aggregate force of it may be. The more com- 
pletely he does this the greater value does he give to his newspaper 
organ; and this value is further enhanced by his enterprise as a col- 
lector and purveyor of news. It cannot escape notice that the secular 
press is to-day giving the religious news of the world with greater 
fullness than the religious press, and this in part because it has better 
facilities for collecting it, and partly because the secular press has a 
direct interest in conveying this news to the public; and it gives 
greater satisfaction to that larger reading constituency, because the 
more narrow sectarian element is generally eliminated. It is because 
the secular press is aiming at universality,—that is, to include every- 


THE PRESS AND RELIGION. 29 


thing that transpires upon the globe of human interest,—that it has 
come more and more to deal with religious news. It cannot well 
separate it from what is wholly secular, for never before were these 
two interests'so completely blended. Nearly every political and social 
question has a religious aspect. ‘The great discoveries and the great 
historic events of the world get their highest meaning in a moral and 
religious interpretation. ‘The diversity of doctrinal beliefs—never 
greater than now—has not weakened that underlying and profound 
religious conviction, that there is a reign of law, and that the Law- 
giver is brooding over the world, and is marshalling all revolutions 
of nations, of science and of philosophy, as so many aids to humanity 
in its struggles and its exodus out of a lower condition up to 4 higher 
plane of life. 

The conductors of the secular press are average men—no more 
and no less. They ought to be more; but observe that while at the 
entrance to all the learned professions there are some tests of fitness, 
the lawyer, minister and doctor being examined as to their qualifica- 
tions to enter upon their chosen professions, there are no tests of 
fitness applied to the conductors of the secular press. Whoever can 
buy types and obtain patrons may undertake the business. The fittest 
sometimes survive; for the rest, the Sheriff acts as undertaker. The 
only real test applied: Is the paper wanted? If it could secure a 
constituency of buffoons or blackguards, it might go for a time. But 
observe that in all the civilized world there is not to-day a secular 
newspaper occupying the foremost rank which is not in some broad 
sense helpful to the religious interests of the community. Nor 
would it be easy to name a newspaper of the second rank that is an 
avowed organ of infidelity. The religious world has created a com- 
mon law of decency, respect and outward deference towards its 
requirements. It is not politic to disregard that law, because it 
represents much of the thought and intelligence of the age. And 
those who create that law ought to be largely concerned in-creating 
public opinion for the day. It is not the many who create it, but 
the few. It has the force of law only when it has received a general 
assent. When rabble-rousing demagogues on the Sand Lots create 
the lower levels of public opinion, more is the need that the religious 
community and the secular press should act as a unit in creating the 
higher levels of public opinion. In default of this, the city has more 
than once been on the verge of mob-rule and possible ruin. The 
mob and its leaders are cowards, having only the element of brute 


30 PACIFIC’ COAST CONFERENCE, 


force. It is the law above the mob that keeps it in place, and the 
potency of that law is the moral quality—the force put into it by 
right-thinking men and a well-conducted press. The keeper rules the 
tiger in his cage with the courage of his eye and his small whip; but 
if the tiger gets loose, it is very bad for the circus. 

As germane to the subject, the distinctively religious element and 
the conductors of the secular press have a common ground of meet- 
ing in efforts to promote popular education. The public school system 
would fall to the ground were it not for this concurrent effort. There 
may be diversity of opinion as to minor details of any educational 
system, but there can be none that downright, stolid ignorance in 
this country is a crime. The secular press is loyal to the principle 
of popular education. It finds little that is good in the tendency 
of that ultra ecclesiasticism cropping out in some of the Protestant 
Churches, which would fall back on the poor expedient of the parish 
school in the place of the public school. The latter is the germ of 
democracy, and there is no other influence so powerful to-day in 
moulding these diverse elements into one common nationality as 
the free public school. The liberty of thought, of. investigation, has 
its inception there. It produces a sturdy, independent manhood; 
it fosters the inquiring, searching, sifting, protesting spirit—the spirit 
which is jealous for liberty regulated by law. Into this great political 
fabric of American citizenship, you, by this means more than any 
other, build in the children of foreign parentage; and, once incorpor- 
ated, all the marks of diverse origin fade out, and you have in place 
the broader and nobler stamp of the American citizen. To the honor 
of the secular press, be it spoken, it is not disposed to play with the 
question. A few demagogues will do that. But patriotism and re- 
ligion will strike hands on this firm and broad ground of common 
defense and common hope for the country. 

In the gradual evolution of the secular press, many excrescences 
will drop off. ‘The newspaper fit to be the guest of the family will 
not be challenged at the door and scrutinized as to its contents. It 
will not be necessary to rake the slums and purlieus of the city for 
offal and filth. ‘There are a multitude of small incidents, the slang 
of bar-rooms, dog fights, the antics of drunken men, the sports .of 
gamblers and bruisers, of no healthy human concern. The record 
of such events is not news, it is not enterprise, but is a mere pander- 
ing to a depraved taste. Neither is the impertinence and vulgarity 
which pries into domestic and social relations, recording gossip and 
scandal, any part of legitimate enterprise, The hawkers and venders 


THE PRESS AND RELIGION. 31 


of such stuff will have their day. A more critical and exacting 
public taste, ought to make it a brief day. It is said that there are 
some cooks so skillful that by use of wines, spices and other condi- 
ments they can convert decayed game into appetising dishes. But 
we neither want the cook nor his dishes. Some day that vulgar 
social ambition which craves publicity and notoriety will feel the 
keen edge of satire as never before. In a world where momentous 
events come crowding so thick and fast that the very lightning must be 
harnessed and made the swift messenger of news—of falling stocks 
and falling thrones, of ships which shall never more come to the 
land, of earthquakes which throb and pulse in the solid earth, of 
tornadoes whjch dismantle cities, of pestilence and war, and obse- 
quies for the heroic dead, the great world-absorbing events,—it is a 
steep descent and a pitiful burlesque to record the number of dia- 
monds which Mrs. Potiphar wore, or the draperies which adorned 
her guests, or the small talk which enlivened a social hour. The 
slang which defiles good English, the personalities and the speech of 
blackguards will be subjected to a rigid quarantine; as well, also, the 
indulgence in exaggerated statements, the tendency to make great 
things out of small things; as if the pigmy on stilts could in that way 
become a giant, or an ant could become an elephant by writing him up. 
It will accord, also, with a better public taste to abridge the minute 
details of great crimes, and to make a better record of what is going 
on in that nobler realm, where the intellectual and religious life of 
the community blends, and the best thought, the best aspirations 
and the best fruits of society abound. Society itself, moving for- 
ward to more perfect ideals, will carry the public journal with it. It 
is the community which gives life and law and tone to the press, 
unconsciously stamping its character there; the press can never be 
better nor worse, but forever and a day it will bear its express image 
and likeness. 

As a camera photographs the living and the dead—hideous forms, 
and forms of symmetry and beauty—so the public journal of to-day, 
with unrestrained license, takes and transmits images of hideous dis- 
tortion and those of everlasting grace and beauty. But it is given to 
you to make it eclectic—to ordain the conditions on which it shall 
come to your households, in the fulfilment of a grand secular min- 
istry, undefiling, wholesome in its influence, bravely set for the 
defence of right against the overshadowing power of wrong—clear 
voiced and sympathetic with humanity—never the master, but always 
the friend. 


TREATMENT OF -.DEPENDEN Tea 
DELINOUASN T :GCHILED Rinne 


ADDRESS BY MR. EDMOND T. DOOLEY. 


The theme assigned me covers a wider area of dicussion than I 
shall attempt in the present paper; nor could any man, tolerably 
modest, esteem it an ordinary task, to formulate on a subject like 
this, views that could be considered very original, either in their con- 
ception or form of presentation, among the representatives of a people 
everywhere distinguished for their intelligent and practical interest in 
social and humanitarian progress. 

By a mere substitution of terms, my paper, if sufficiently ex- 
haustive, would embrace the question that underlies all other problems 
—how to live, or the education of a human being in all his parts and 
relations; and in a discussion touching the treatment of the classes 
indicated—the dependent and delinquent in childhood—one has but 
to descend from generalizations on the parent problem, to the consid- 
eration of certain methods and degrees in the employment of those 
principles. 

A child becomes a public nuisance or expense, really never through 
any fault of his own, but because of the omissions or more positive 
delinquencies of others, near or remote, usually his parents. The 
“victim of circumstances”—that impersonal and irresponsible myth, 
is a creature often found on paper, but seldom, if ever, encountered 
in actual experience—never at least have I recognized it, and I have 
been intimately acquainted with the antecedents of many hundreds 
of children. It may be very convenient for some, and very kind in 
others, to so designate the results of an ill-considered, a prudential, a 
lustful or an otherwise unholy marriage—such, as it may be, the 
average one is; ‘suchas fill our Courts with divorce and other criminal 
proceedings, our newspapers with scandal and our social atmosphere 
with moral malaria and the germs of deadly infection. It may be 
that improvidence, sickly-indulgence, false pride, contention, absence 


DEPENDENT AND DELINQUENT CHILDREN. 33 


of self-control and sympathy, the substitution of impulse for principle 
and other inconsistencies of conduct are not sinful in parents, or in- 
fluential for evil on their offspring. It may be that children have 
no righteous claims upon their kindred, and that the State itself has 
no forehanded policy incumbent upon it. But, if not, what are the 
duties of parents and kindred, and what is the business of the social 
organization and the meaning of statesmanship? Yes, we can dis- 
cover the ‘“‘circumstances.” They are all too painfully apparent, and 
the children are the “victims.” But they are not chance develop- 
ments, nor have the young had any responsible part in their creation. 

It would be neither charity, honesty nor prudence to thus ignore 
the teachings of universal experience and common sense; of logic, 
religion and every accepted principle of science. ‘‘So far is it from 
the truth,” says Mr. Spencer, in relation to the common error among 
the mass of people of ascribing the fault to children rather than 
parents, ‘‘so far is this from the truth, that we do not hesitate to 
say that to parental misconduct is traceable a great part of the 
domestic disorder commonly ascribed to the perversity of children.” 
Of a better class of parents than those of the children now under 
consideration, he says: ‘‘Thinking after the prevalent chaotic fashion, 
they assume that these evils (in their offspring) came without causes, 
or that the causes are supernatural. Nothing of the kind. In some 
cases the causes are doubtless inherited, but in most cases the 
parents themselves are responsible.” 

A week ago I counted forty and odd children, in age from seven to 
twelve years, in one group, and in broad daylight, laboriously prying 
out of place and carrying off for fuel, in sacks, baskets, pails and 
arm-loads, the wooden pavement of one of our broad and much- 
traveled streets. Were they conscious of any guilt in the matter? 
Without doubt every child knew he or she was doing wrong. They 
had sentinels posted up and down the street to warn them of danger 
—the “Cop.” They worked with the haste and silence of evil doers, 
and when a big loafer shouted “‘Cheese it!” they fled precipitately— 
all in one direction, for the whole of them evidently lived in a single 
block on Minna street. ‘They might have been raiding an orchard, 
or a melon patch, or a cupboard for sweets, or slying into a circus or 
the like, without being essentially or prospectively dishonest, or 
without casting any imputation of wickedness upon their parents, 
but that they could take firewood (a commodity good for no purpose 
that a child has any conscious interest in), under such circumstances, 


34 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


and carry it home to honest or half-honest parents, is entirely incon- 
ceivable. No! they were forty thieves, more than possible criminals— 
the progeny of dishonest and vicious parents, every one of them. Is 
not this a symptom of a most malignant disease, alarmingly prevalent? 
Were the children in this instance at fault? 

What children want is not mere shelter and animal subsistence, but 
a home—something that not one in twenty of the boys and girls who 
get into the hands of the law, who are debauched and poison society, 
morally and physically—have. ‘The true direction of child-saving 
enterprise is to supply the restraints and helps and influences which 
have been wanting, and which are imperatively essential to the child- 
life and its normal unfolding into self-respecting, self-reliant, productive 
citizenship. The best kind of an “‘institution” is only a mere me- 
chanical contrivance to supply the want of a home, and experience in 
successful work among the young is unitedly against the institutional 
idea. 

This State provides for certain merely dependent children in insti- 
tutions—not homes—but with the exception of Section 1,388 of the 
Penal Code, no legal provision or public enterprise exists in California 
for erring children, but that wretched den, the Industrial School of 
San Francisco, the county jails and the State penitentiaries. The 
attention given to children by the State, in appropriations for the 
support of the merely dependent in private institutions, may or may 
not be effective—and the increasing criminality among the young and 
the very large and rapidly growing number of children in institu- 
tions, indicate plainly that it is not effective. In Coldwater, Michigan, 
is a State institution, for abandoned and orphan children, that seems 
to be doing its work in a most natural and comprehensive manner, 
and with the efficiency that distinguishes Michigan and other Eastern 
States in their public charities, and which contrasts so strongly 
with the expensive temporizing of California in her corresponding 
concerns. 

The school has been in existence eleven years, and to-day, with 
only 214 inmates (these but temporarily detained——as at the Boys and 
Girls Aid Society—-while on their way to homes), it represents all the 
“dependent” children that are chargeable to the public in that great 
community of two millions of inhabitants. 

Of the 1,525 who have gone from the school, 93 per cent. or 
1,418, are either in homes being cared for at private expense or are 
self-supporting, honest citizens; while 7 per cent., or 107, have either 


DEPENDENT AND DELINQUENT CHILDREN. 35 


drifted into criminal life or are being supported by the counties of the 
State. 

The running expenses of this institution have been about $35,000 
a year, and in this connection we offer some food for particular 
thought in enlightened California: For the biennial period ending 
with 1884 California expended the sum of $401,000 for the support 
of merely dependent children in institutions; and for the six months 
ending December 31, 1885, $107,473.35, or at the rate of $430,000 
for the current biennial period, against Michigan’s $70,000 (or less 
than one-sixth) for the same term. California, with less than one-half 
the population of Michigan, supports 3,325 children in institutions, 
against Michigan’s 214. Ina recent issue of “Child and State” I 
wrote that not only was California’s wholesale and indiscriminate 
impounding of children a fearful social wrong, but expressed the 
opinion that out of every one hundred children cared for in this State 
at public expense, sixty of them should, and might easily, be cared 
for at private expense. In proportion to the inhabitants, our State- 
supported children are 32 times more numerous than those of Mich- 
igan. Here are the numbers and percentages in our California 
institutions: 


Rave seins pot cy ts 90s 0s 60 children 8 t 

me 5 Nels sid ald se whale) Bec children pila “OTs Fi FAS Pea 

Re 8d. Sais sig dd ona lg do AA INUCLEC TDG Seu Due lA aang og Scary 24 22 per cent. 

RIMM OEOUARS 5.0008 se 3 oe oss Be OUMNGI carats oag's ea ven oa 70 per cent. 
3325 


What means this seventy per cent. of half-orphans thrown upon 
public care—this two and one-third times as many as the orphans, the 
abandoned and the foundlings combined ? 

Can any experienced person suppose that one-half of these “ half- 
orphans” are a legitimate charge upon the community, and that it 
can realize any wholesome moral or material benefit from such an 
investment—that any real good can arise from such profligacy and 
misdirection of expenditure? ‘The expenditures in this State for 
these children during the last two years exceeded the amount of all 
appropriations for the State Public School in Michigan (and the 
dependent children of that State) since its establishment eleven years 
ago; and, to use the language of a paper read before the National 
Conference of Charities, of 1885, by an Eastern observer: “The 
important fact before the people of California is, that the number of 
this class is increasing to an alarming extent, and the cost of main- 


36 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE, 


tenance growing in a corresponding ratio.” But even this unparal- 
leled expenditure of money is the least alarming feature of the case: 


THE CONTRAST. 


CALIFORNIA.| MICHIGAN. 


Population teen ates so fae eit ee hee ee eae ee 950,000 2,000,000 
‘¢ Dependent ” children in institutions............ 35325 214 
Cost per antiumic. ic) ok Scho een hs beers Or eee $215,000 $35,000 
Cost for ten'years at present/rate......'..0. 050... $2,150,000 $350,000 


I to every I to every. 


Proportion of ‘‘dependent” children to population { 286 persons | 9,346 persons 


Apparent results: California—more “dependent,” increase of 
hoodlumism and crime and of our prison population; Michigan—g3 
per cent. (of the otherwise ‘“‘ dependent”) doing well, in family homes, 
and at no present expense to the State. 

Here, on the one hand, you have destruction and desolation of 
the most horrible sort; and on the other, the beneficent constructive 
work of broad, economic, wise statesmanship. 

Here we see the policy of this State. Its laws, or want of them, 
actually engaged in the direct work of making dependents, paupers 
and criminals of its children. There could not be prescribed a better 
way to destroy young lives and to invite social anarchy than that pur- 
sued by California to-day. 

What is being done in an organized manner to educate public sen- 
timent in this matter and to correct these threatening evils? Some- 
thing, in a general way; but directly and aggressively, only what the 
Boys and Girls Aid Society is doing. ‘To remedy matters a bill was 
submitted to the Legislature last winter providing for a State Board 
of Charities, to consist of nine persons—three of these to be women— 
for comparatively little was ever done in juvenile work until the 
mother-instinct took hold. To keep it from the damning influences 
of politics and sectarianism, not more than two were to be of the 
same sect, nor more than three of the male members to come from 
the same political party, and none of them were to receive any com- 
pensation. ‘They were to be constituted the guardians of all depend- 
ent and delinquent children who were maintained wholly or in part 
by the State, excepting such as had acting guardians at the time of 
the passage of the Act, which was to obviate all hardships to parents 


DEPENDENT AND DELINQUENT CHILDREN. a7. 


or others fit and disposed to resume their charge; the whole measure 
proceeding upon the principle that where parents, or either of them, 
were living and able they should be obliged to care for their own. 
If they were improper persons, or for any other reason unfit or inca- 
pable of training a future citizen, the matter was to be judicially de- 
termined, and the State, in protection of itself and the child, assumed 
its control. They were authorized to indenture or adopt their wards 
as the peculiar circumstances in each instance seemed to warrant, 
and empowered to board them, so far as seemed practicable, in ap- 
proved families, rather than in institutions. Full power was given to 
examine into the condition and methods of any and all institutions 
having the custody of any State-supported child, and no claim for 
the mainzenance of any such child was to be allowed without their 
approval. ‘They were to employ a State agent, who in turn was to 
engage needed assistants, all to be selected for their known ability, 
special education, character and peculiar fitness for the work, whose 
duties were: To regularly visit all children indentured, adopted, 
or placed in charge of any family, person or institution, and see that 
their surroundings and treatment were proper and their legal and 
moral rights respected. The State agent was to be notified whenever 
a minor. was charged with any offense, and it was to be his duty to 
attend the trial in person or by an assistant, to protect the minor’s 
interests and to aid in the wise disposal of the case. 

The Board was to make a biennial report, embodying a statement 
of the disbursement made from the State money for the support of 
the children under their supervision and estimates of the amounts re- 
quired for the succeeding two years. ‘The report was to contain tab- 
ulated statements and a review of the condition and workings of the 
several institutions having State children, and of the age, sex, social 
condition and antecedents, and the disposition or present custody of 
the children under their oversight, together with such suggestions and 
recommendations as to appropriations, institutions, and charitable and 
reformatory interests of the State as they deemed expedient. 

But though the bill was reported on favorably from the Committee 
on Public Morals, there it rested, so great was the pressure of selfish 
interest against it. 

This cutting off at a single stroke of perhaps $200,000 per annum 
in the revenues of private asylums—what though the State Treasury, 
or rather the taxpayers, retained the amount, and a happier era was 
to be ushered in forthe defenseless children—was “too hard to bear.” 


38 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


That the bill was perfect in all its details was not to be expected, 
but that its adoption would have placed us a long way in the direc- 
tion of remedying the glaring evils of our existing condition, is beyond 
question. | 

Some measure like the one outlined is, in my opinion, imperatively 
necessary as the basis of all operations in this department in Califor- 
nia, and every State west of the Rocky Mountains. 

I mentioned a large number of children as having received benefit 
from our Society during the year. ‘“‘ What! So many from the streets, 
the Courts and prisons, from poverty and misfortune, and gathered in 
one vast corral, under one roof; there retained at great expense, moral 
and financial; there for ‘show,’ to ignore and dwarf the individuality 
and to eliminate every hopeful instinct ; to destroy not only the inde- 
pendence of the children, but to pauperize and embrute parents 
and guardians in its reflex effect—and to hasten on ‘the coming 
slavery’?” 

No—not that! Hardly more than one-third of them have them- | 
selves been under our roof. Our principles do not permit, nor would 
our finances allow, any expensive or congregate handling of these 
young lives. 

The theory of the work, and the spirit and tendency of all its 
efforts, for the actual and the more remote or probable beneficiaries 
of the Society, are to head off those conditions of dependence and 
moral obliquity, and to correct the circumstances and ideas that fur- 
nish the materials for an extended statistical or “institutional ” show- 
ing. Hundreds of families who are never represented by an actual 
inmate in our Home, are constantly having better than alms from 
this Society. agit 

What is the best thing to do for the case in hand? independent of 
its possible appearance on our records, or whether the form of our 
relief be at all recordable. ‘That is our proposition. 

Service like this—opposed to mechanical efforts with moral pro- 
blems—whose business it is to rub out, as much as possible, the 
necessity of any enterprise that would substitute the true home and 
subvert individual action and private, personal responsibility—such 
work can no more be gauged by records than love, or patience, or 
heart-ache can be told off by a tape-line; than the value of the friend 
over alms; than the very best work any person or organization can 
perform—prevention, an ounce of which we all deem better than a 
pound of cure. 


Mere DICE NRO OURS TION, 


¢ 
ADDRESS BY REY. T. L. ELIOT, OF PORTLAND, OREGON. 


In the last volume of the Encyclopedia Britanica, a notable article 
is that on ‘ Political Economy,” by Professor Ingram. Please read 
it, you who ponder the great parable of Social Life. It has in it 
something of the light of prophecy, and comforts one with a working 
capital of faith, by which to keep on straightening the crooked and 
planing the rough places, — “‘preparing a highway for our God.” 
True, the idols of the tribes, many of them, have to go—expensive 
material for road-making,—but either crumbled in the roadway for 
ballast, or standing off the way-side for mile-stones, they must be, as 
human minds learn to train behind the intelligence of Him who feeds 
his flock of nations and eras like a shepherd, and gathers the lambs 
of his spiritual purpose in his bosom. ‘This writer concludes that 
political economy, like many another scheming of human thought, has 
had its day of Ptolemaic systems, making the sun and stars swing 
round the vegetable patch. He hints of Newtonian work to be done, 
reversing old orders, destroying illusions and humbling the imagina- 
tion into new molds, the reason into divine methods. Just now there 
is a touching of elbows in the dark between all the daylight-wise men 
of our world. Each man once thought his ’ology was lantern enough 
for his own particular trade in ideas, or his search for star, or insect, 
or world motion. What had they in common, the men of thought 
and the men of affairs? What connection between embryology and 
the reform bill, or the boundary line of Afghanistan? What has a 
chemist’s test-tube to do with Pope Leo, or the Falk Laws with the 
theory of cometary substance? But now a wholesome twilight hints 
that it is dark ahead ; the trails are giving out; the whole band must 
close up, for they need each other, and no straggler is safe. Woe to 
the man that tries to think or go alone! ‘Theology, Statecraft, artist 
and tinker, all must stand in, to give and take. Such is the new note 
of progress, and it seems to echo an old saying: ‘‘ None of us liveth 
to himself or dieth to himself, but whether we live or die we are the 
Lord’s.” 


40 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE, 


Professor Ingram, describing political economy in its various 
stages and hasty generalizations, notes the fallacies of thinking wealth 
to be money or things bought and sold; the emptiness of the old 
cries of ‘‘natural liberty,” ‘“‘indefeasible rights,” ‘social contract;” 
the misfit to society of the theories of human selfishness and ‘‘ Zazssez 
Jaire,” is duly touched upon; the subordination of political economy 
to sociology as a whole, and its keynote in moral ideas are empha- 
sized, not rhetorically, but as plain inductions and pointers of history 
and the structure of man’s unitary nature. And into these statements 
he culminates: ‘‘The individual point of view will have to be subor- 
dinated to the social;” ‘‘each agent will have to be regarded as an 
organ of the society to which he belongs, and of the larger society 
of the race.” ‘The old doctrine of right has done its temporary 
work; a doctrine of duty will have to be substituted, fixing on posi- 
tive grounds the nature of the social co-operation of each class and of 
each member of the community.” Of the industrial problem, he 
says: “The mere conflict of private interests will never produce a 
well-ordered commonwealth of labor.” ‘Freedom is not solution. 
The solution must be at all times largely a moral one. What is 
now most urgent is not legislative interference on any large scale 
with the industrial relations, but the formation in both the higher and 
lower regions of the industrial world; of profound convictions as to 
social duties and some more effective mode than at present exists of 
diffusing, maintaining and applying these convictions.” In such words 
are outlined the temper of humility and the constructive breadth of 
the New Method—a method whose first fruits are seen in the recast- 
ings of every segment of human knowledge, and the sloughing away 
of ‘‘facts” that are not facts, and ‘‘principles” that are fallacies. The 
old and popular way of getting truth out of one’s own head, and with 
one’s own eyes, is at a great discount, say sixty per cent. to the trade! 
The earth goes round the sun—the rivers of a continent are older 
than its mountains—the highest mountains of the world are not the 
oldest, but the newest—and science is constantly putting forth asser- 
tions of which it may be said, as Euler does of some mathematical 
proposition concerning arches: ‘‘This is contrary to all experience, 
nevertheless it is true.” Do not think, friends, that I have forgotten 
my theme. The “Drink Question” is part of what Carlyle calls 
“the condition of the people” question. The “condition of the 
people question” is part of political economy and biology; these are 
segments of sociology, and I am simply endeavoring to cast a special 


THE DRINK QUESTION. 41 


limited inquiry in the major-key of historic method and abstention 
from riders, of patience with the past and of rational outlook for the 
future, which is the note of real progress, the hope of providential 
solutions in an actual world. 

“The individual point of view, to be subordinated to the social;” 
“The old doctrine of right, of personal liberty, done with: a doctrine 
of duty to be substituted.” ‘‘Mere conflict of private interests not 
enough.” ‘The solution, largely to be a moral one: the formation 
both in the higher and lower regions of society, of profound convic- 
tions as to social duties: and some more effective way than at present ex- 
ists of diffusing and applying these convictions :”—must not the “Drink 
Question” train in the ranks with these reverent, watch-tower princi- 
ples and learn passwords of their camp? It is a burning question, 
and human nature being such as it is, a real social problem starts a 
conflict of bias, as well as of principle—of assumptions jostling as- 
sumptions; heat of advocacy met by buffers of indifference; one 
illusive theory wrestling with another, and one disgust at unreason, 
wont to push with the horn at another. It is the cow-boy era, during 
which too many are tempted to cry off or on at fugitive alarums and 
excursions. But above the debatable land, two or three facts and 
tendencies begin to define themselves, and they take the color of the 
New Method—with such “large discourse looking before and after,” 
that they cannot fust in us unused. 

first, We may note that the Drink Question is causing in the 
world to-day a more serious ‘‘arrest of thought” than in any previous 
age. This is both an effect and a cause. Life is from two to ten times 
faster-lived now than fifty years since, and the Drink habit, both from 
physiological and social reasons, takes on corresponding dimensions, 
and enlarged baneful results. And a correspondingly accelerated in- 
telligence, and diffusive attention brings the evil before the thinking 
world, in all its bearings; the thing in itself, made known by its con- 
sequences and traced to its antecedents. It is now safe to say that 
the coming statesman of Russia or England or America, will not be 
he who causes two’ blades of grass to grow where one did, but he who 
causes one Drink shop to stand where two did—-or, rather, effects that 
there shall be only one craving for two in human lives and society for 
that which Drink mockingly gives them. It is equally safe to say that 
the spiritual and moral orders of society, the representatives of con- 
science and the conservation of the race, are to be ranked, or dis- 
ranked, by what they can do and say about social problems, of which 


42 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE, 


the Drink question is one. Protestant and Catholic, or if there is to 
be another, a religion of the future, will take survival or decay largely 
by the grasp put on “‘the condition of the people” question. ‘The 
divinity schools need professors of social science, more than of 
Hebrew, and to study church history, not for museum making, but 
for the men’s methods who made history, and salted society. In the 
hierarchy of science, that one will easily wear the Urim and Thum- 
mim, which gives most working illumination to the world, inspiring 
men with balance and continence; and which takes the form of re- 
generative social processes. 

“The Drink question, in its different phases of Total Abstinence, 
Prohibition and Regulation.” So the topic is assigned me, and calls 
for some expression of observation and study as to ways of meeting 
the ground swell, Alcohol. I may assume common consent as to 
the gravity of intemperance, the baleful influence of the Drink shop. 
We believe Gladstone, when he sadly says: ‘‘ We have suffered more 
in our time from intemperance than from war, pestilence and famine 
combined, those three greatest scourges of our race.” We respect 
Huxley’s opinion and scientific sincerity when he says: ‘ Talk of po- 
litical questions—there lies beneath all these questions the great 
question whether that profligate misery which dogs the footsteps of 
modern civilization, shall be allowed to exist. I believe that is the 
great political question of the future.” We accept testimony, like 
Chancellor Eliot’s, as verifiable of every American city, when he says: 
‘T have lived in St. Louis forty-eight years, and have seen it grow from 
7500 to nearly 400,000 inhabitants. During these years it has passed 
through trials of pestilence, of devastating fires, of water floods, and 
worst of all, four years of fratricidal war. But I here assert, in all so- 
berness of mind, and with readiness to prove what I say, that all other 
trials and losses, sufferings and calamities, and wrongs, in all 
these forty-eight years combined, do not equal the ruinous moral, so- 
cial and financial evil that I have seen produced, during the same 
period, by the one cause—intoxicating drink.” ‘The Drink question 
then narrows to the question of individual and social duty and re- 
sponsibility, in view of a national vice, which, whether a symptom or 
the disease itself, contains the most formidable threat to civilization. 

As to the attitude of the individual, let me plead first the dignity and 
the privilege of “‘ zoblesse oblige.” If the new political economy is 
true: if the old doctrine of right must yield to a doctrine of duty, and 
the individual point of view is to be subordinated to the social, does not 


THE DRINK QUESTION. 43 


abstinence rise to the sanctity and force of moral law? Waiving the 
minor questions as to whether moderate use helps or hurts the indi- 
vidual, whether it is a “personal” right or not, does not the New 
Method, do not the new data of ethics demand of us by sympathetic 
impulse, to merge individualism and personally discountenance a 
habit, which is by count unhinging the average manhood of the age? 
By a finer logic than any line we can draw between use and abuse, 
order and disorder, the social customs of the well-to-do, lend color, 
rather we should say, strike color into every stage below. The ‘‘Rech- 
abite idea,” could it gain real hold of society at the top and middle, 
would be three-fourths solution of the problem. Entire abstinence 
from drinking customs, social or otherwise, on the ground of social 
function, yielding a personal liberty, or right, if you choose, for the 
sake of the greatest good of all, is the phase on which the noblest 
stress can be put. And I look, some day, for one of those profoundly 
mysterious moral climacterics, in which we feel the rush of God; an 
emotion of the mass, that shall lay aside the use of every form of 
alcoholic beverage, by the. strong and free, for the sake of the weak 
and enslaved! An emotion, moving as the south wind does upon 
winter snows, and doing more in hours than all our shoveling can do 
in years. Canon Farrar voices it in words that we wish every patriot 
and christian might learn: ‘‘I have no doubt some of us have become 
total abstainers, because we believe that course to be the best for our- 
selves; others, to avoid temptation; and others, because in this age 
of luxury, they think it desirable to introduce some simplification into 
the luxurious elements of life. But the real reason, which, like the 
rod of Aaron, swallows up all the rest, is this—that we have become 
abstainers out of a sense of shame and a feeling of pity. We have 
felt a sense of shame to think that mankind, by hundreds and thou- 
sands, are making of life one continuous degradation, and one slow 
approach of disease and death. We say, out of pity, because we see 
women who are pouring vitriol into the roses of their womanhood ; 
but, also, because of those still more miserable, who become the 
slaves of the brutality of husbands, and of sons whom drink has 
maddened into fiends; and also out of pity to the children, whose 
lives are sacrificed in hundreds to this awful Moloch, and who, to use 
the language of a former canon of Westminster, more than one hun- 
dred years ago, are ‘not so much born into the world as damned into 
the world.’ Itis out of pity for these men, women and children, and 
also out of pity for our country, which for more than two hundred 


44 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


years has been writhing in the folds of this hell-born dragon of drunk- 
enness, and also out of pity for the whole race of men which goes on, 
generation after generation, cherishing in its bosom that which blights 
so many careers, blasts so much happiness, and which of all human 
evils, is the most easily and most absolutely preventable. These are 
the grounds on which we are total abstainers.” May we not affec- 
ionately commend such words, and yoke them to the Christ-spirit, 
now rising to take the helm of the State?” 

‘The phases of prohibition and regulation :”—“‘cras ingens tterabimus 
aeguor.” On the great and wide sea of legislative action—where shall a 
safe course be held? Questions involving the whole theory and practice 
of human nature and the social organism are involved at this point, 
yet it is men’s misfortune that events draw their fire; we are precipi- 
tated upon sides, compelled to action out of the light happening to be 
in our own heads, or out of the provincial forms, which the greater 
questions of governmental function take in varying communities and 
social climates. For the purposes of this brief paper it may be as- 
sumed that the theoretic right of society at large, by statutes and 
police, either to regulate or prohibit the drink traffic, is unquestiona- 
ble. From the stand-point of the State, the whole question at issue 
is, of degree and of expediency. The problem is conspicuously a 
practical one. What principle and practice of legislation will procure 
the result society is most nearly agreed upon, and voice its determina- 
tion to restrain a great evil? Theoretically, it is inevitable that dif- 
fering answers will be given, and the problem, locally, will always be 
one of administration. The social philosopher will strive to generalize 
from many actual experiments and conditions; but we fear that it is 
too early to hope for a universal formula of the application of laws 
or equations for the value of all social unknown quantities. We may 
accept Mr. Gladstone’s great major premise of law, that ‘legislation 
shall make it easy for the people to do right, and make it difficult to 
do wrong,” but how and when, both to apply this principle and in- 
terpret results, is now the issue in the “great, warm and ruffling par- . 
liament” of man. 

With diffidence, I venture to make two or three presentations of 
reasons which lead me to think that, as a matter of historic proba- 
bilism, the Drink question will never rest, or be adequately met ex- 
pect as the result of a series of conflicts at the polls, and through ten- 
dencies of legislation, pointing a similar social policy toward the sale 
of intoxicating drink as that maintained toward gambling and pros- 
titution, 


THE DRINK QUESTION. 45 


In a democratic form of government, parties in the long run always 
form about moral ideas, and the time of such formation is determined 
by what most interests the people morally; or to change the state- 
ment a little, the time of such formation of parties is determined when 
moral oppositions, of a broad and general character, are set up. From 
whatever side such a moral opposition rises, there is induced a nat- 
ural polarity of progressive and non-progressive forces—of good and 
evil—which predetermines the question into the foreground of public 
affairs. It has been the fault and folly of statesmen to ignore this. 
When Charles Sumner took his place in the Senate, old Thomas 
Benton said: ‘‘ You have come upon the stage too late, sir. All our 
great men have passed away; the great issues, too, raised from our 
form of government, have been settled also. Nothing is left for you, 
sir, but puny, sectional questions and petty strifes about slavery and 
fugitive slave laws, involving no national interests.” So shortsighted 
could a man be, himself for thirty years on the active field of political 
service. The chief crisis in our history was then making up; that 
which, under the social tendency I have noted, was crowding forward 
the moral issue involved in keeping house without paying wages. 
The analogy between such a question as slavery and drink is I know 
often belittled, but it seems to me, in the essential respects that point 
toward a solution in politics, the analogy is close and_ prophetic. 
Thus: The functional disturbance from the drinking habit and its 
allies is profound, and calls for social, moral functions to arrest it; 
but the attempt to arrest provokes aggression, and this in turn com- 
pels broadening and deeper resistance. The lower side of such 
a controversy, that out of relation to the survival of the social 
organism, instinctively feels its moral weakness, and therefore throws 
strenuous force into the machinery of self-protection—its dependence 
is statutes, “constitutional rights,” the administration of affairs, either 
positively or negatively. The challenged party in a duel invariably 
chooses the ground and weapons. An unknown force, of which they 
are really the unconscious instruments, has led the whole class whose 
direct and indirect interest it is to increase the drink traffic—such a 
force, I say, has led this class to concentrate their main influence, 
not upon propaganda, but upon legislation and administration of 
‘““the law.” It is ¢key who have thus chosen and predestined the 
question into the arena of politics. JI am not aware that this view of 
the case is often presented, but I think it is borne out by dispassion- 
ate observation. ‘The fact is disguised—the political influence of the 


46 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


drink-making class plays not as a party, but as a balance of power, 
and that not openly. With swift instinct they stand by the legislator 
and the executive, the prosecuting attorney and the chief of police. 
By explicit or implied pledges obtained or threats invoked, the power 
we allude to is thrust deep into the social organism. Whoever works 
for social reform, and by whatever methods, comes full upon the fact 
of this chosen stronghold of the drink traffic. ‘Those who are doing 
most, by the methods of moral suasion and education—we mean not 
those who raise the hue and cry, but those who are strenuously work- 
ing in that line—are the most impressed by the fact we allude to. To 
concentrate their influence positively or negatively upon legislation, 
upon parties, upon the administration of the laws, is the bulwark and 
defense of the drink-disseminating class; and this method is so suc- 
cessful, and so thwarts the efforts of the reformer, by making it for 
multitudes difficult to do right and easy to do wrong—society actu- 
ally becoming an instrument legislating and administrating men into 
vice—that he, the reformer and philanthropist, is carried by the logic 
of his own motives and acts to contest the ground which not he, but 
his opponents have chosen and measured. ‘Thus the duel between the 
home and the saloon is determined into politics by the choice of the 
latter. It is on politics that the drink traffic takes its stand—a vast 
secret and defiant disturbing force. Sooner or later the moral senti- 
ment must meet it there, and accept, as part of the reformation of 
society, a political responsibility in law-making and administration. 
Lastly. It seems to me inevitable that as this social reform is 
drawn into the arena of politics, it will be compelled by its adversaries 
to take higher and higher restrictive ground, merging into the princi- 
ple of social ban and prohibition. The conflict will take the form of 
country against city, within state lines; and may be pushed to na- 
tional dimensions, on the questions of interstate commerce and fed- 
eral revenue. I donot enter into the argument pro or con., why 
these things should be or not be, nor do I take up the considerations 
often alluded to in such an argument, of a priori social rights or 
infringements of the American patent of self-government. ‘There are 
other correlative questions which the time-limit forbids, not the least 
of which is the physiological one, and the inquiry whether, were the 
evil arrested too violently, it might not be transmuted into other 
forms, obscurer and harder to deal with, like the opium-habit. Other 
observers will hang solicitude upon the confusion of vice and crime, 
and the social backsets from the endeavor to “legislate men into 


THE DRINK QUESTION. A7 


morals.” On all these interesting topics we make the note that they 
are largely academic, and will be little mooted by the actual world of 
social conflict. The form of such questions and the answer can 
hardly be abstracted from the living struggle, the actual collisions and 
determinations of the factors of social life. These collisions and de- 
terminations of the blood social to the head or heart compel theories 
often to read backward. We make no doubt of blunders and infe- 
licities enough in the course of the controversy. It will take strange 
forms and invoke strange partnerships. We may be sure, however, 
that through all the confusion, the idea which will steadily gain 
ground is the organic one which subordinates the individual stand- 
point to the social—the question of vzgh¢ to that of function. This 
idea will draw to itself all others. It will inspire individual self-sacri- 
fice, and it will infuse new force into moral education; it will utilize 
the sciences; it will decide and control legislative and administrative 
forces, and so slowly but surely sift the people. The principle that 
at last must penetrate the public mind and change the moral climate, 
especially where it is always dullest—at the top—is the Christ-cdea, 
finding expression in interpretations of the relation of society to 
the individual, and of the individual to society, such as sociology is 
now framing, but which only the religious consciousness and emotions 
of mankind will supply with adequate motive force. 

Notre.—tThe last two pages of the Encyclopedia article, referred to at the beginning of this 
paper, should be read to do justice to Professor Ingram. The conclusions I have drawn from 
some of his principles, and the application of them to the Drink question in America, may be 
quite apart from what the author himself would make; but seem to me to be involved, under 


what he describes as ‘‘the pressure of practical needs, and social exigencies which force the 
hands of statesmen whatever their attachment to abstract formulas.” 


PRESENT BEARINGS OF PHI ROS@iaae 
UPON PR be [OINS 


OUTLINE OF THE ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON. 


Between the principle of philosophy and the principle of religion, 
there is prima facie an apparent antagonism. Religion presupposes 
the absolute sacredness of the law which it delivers for the regula- 
tion of life, and the like sacredness of the doctrines upon which 
that law necessarily depends. Philosophy, on the contrary, counts 
nothing sacred, except as it vindicates itself at the bar of reason. 
Indeed, it does not hold reason itself sacred, except as this justifies 
itself to itself through relentless doubt and unsparing criticism. How 
can this apparent antagonism be reconciled? 

Moreover, philosophy in our times is supremely concerned with 
this self-criticism of reason, and the consequent criticism of the most 
intimate natural products of reason, the fundamental doctrines of 
religion—the belief in God, in duty, and in immortality. Present 
philosophy, almost the world over, is agnostic; it doubts the power 
of reason to reach any real knowledge whatever. ‘To such represent- 
ative thinkers of our age as Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and 
Friedrich Lange, reason is not ascertainably anything more than an 
idiosyncrasy of the particular species of being called man. It isa 
faculty shut up within the sphere of its own specific constitution, and 
unable certainly to report anything but the forms under which real- 
ities appear to that. Whether this constitution is in such intimate 
rapport with the inner nature of things as to reveal the absolute 
truth concerning it, these distinguished men, and those whom they 
have convinced, consider an unsolvable problem; not simply hitherto 
unsolved, but permanently and utterly unsolvable. It seems thus to 
be made out that we can £xow nothing but phenomena; we can 
note and record and classify the appearances that present themselves 
in experience, but we cannot, with certainty, do anything more. Our 
function called knowing is merely our own. It has no assured univer- 
sality; no certain light, that is, of universal intelligence. It does 


BEARINGS OF PHILOSOPHY UPON RELIGION. 49 


not share in any vision of eternity; at least, not so far as we can 
possibly ascertain. Even what we call the science of nature, our 
penetration into the laws of the sensible world, our predictive insight 
into the order of future experience, is only tentative. The uniformity 
of the past raises in us, to be sure, an exfectancy of its continuance 
in the future; but this expectancy is not valid knowledge until veri- 
fied by the actual subsequent event, and not even this verification 
can raise the expectancy into anything more than an unverified 
belief; there is, and can be, no universal knowledge even of nature. 
Still less can there be such knowledge, or, indeed, azy knowledge, 
of such matters as God, immutable duty or immortality; every one 
of which implies the flight of reason, not only beyond the limits of 
actual experience, but beyond all bounds of even possible experience. 

Such is the predominant conviction of the philosophy of our 
times. I do not share it; but I hold the question urgent, as well as 
interesting, to ask what its real bearings are upon theoretical and prac- 
tical religion. It would seem, even on a first view, that the apparent 
antagonism in principle between philosophy and religion could only 
be reduced by showing the three great postulates of religion—God, 
duty and immortality—to be permanently founded in reason; but 
the agnostic view pronounces such showing impossible. Is there, 
then, any way in which the agnostic view can be superseded, and 
philosophy and religion be brought into active accord? 


As to the real bearing of the prevalent philosophy upon religion, it 
is worth while to show that the agnostic position is irreconcilably at 
variance with the permanence of religion. Men are sooner or later 
guided by that alone which they hold to be certain; or, more exactly, 
a basis of certainty is the indispensable condition of their continued 
action. Nothing but the warrant of reason will ever permanently 
rule the convictions and practice of men in organized society; noth- 
ing else ever does really guide them—nothing but reason, at least, 
as they apprehend it. The multitude may follow the current fashion 
of thought blindly, but the leaders follow only their reason, as they 
see it. Now the essence of practical religion is, the living of a 
righteous life of benign relationship with other persons; the render- 
ing to moral law a devout obedience, inspired by the conviction that 
it issues from eternity, and is therefore the will of God. Practical 
religion thus rests upon the presumed absolute certainty, the assured 
divine sanction, of those convictions of the mind which make up 


50 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE, 


the precepts of morality; so that if once the doctrine is profoundly 
accepted and adequately realized, that we are incapable of knowing 
God, of apprehending a divine will, or of having any thoughts that 
penetrate to eternal relations and see by the light of absolute intelli- 
gence, then neither religion nor morality can long survive. The vital 
nerve of morals is du¢y—conviction of unconditional obligation. But 
the necessary ground of obligation is, that the precept to which we 
are bound shall be of universal and absolute contents. Let the law 
claiming authority over our conduct be once attainted of imperfec- 
tion; let a shadow of limitation, of relativity, once fall upon it; our 
reverence for it, our allegiance to it, is then forever gone—vanished 
beyond our recalling. Conscience instantly transfers its allegiance 
from the detected finite to the infinite imperative, with which the 
former is necessarily contrasted. Conscience kneels, and can kneel, 
to nothing but the infinite, the absolute. What, then, if this infi- 
nite, this absolute, be reduced to a mere conjecture—a vast and 
shadowy interrogation-point in the void Unknowable? What if the 
reason in us that alone formulates the precepts of life and guides our 
conduct shall have been stripped of all universality, and laid bare in 
the nakedness of a mere human idiosyncrasy? What binding author- 
ity over conduct can its utterances have after that? Between those 
modes of our consciousness that lure us to present pleasure or pri- 
vate gain, and those that summon or seem to summon us to rational 
behavior, to the reverence of private and public right, who can then 
decide? It is useless to say in answer, as the agnostic usually does, 
that the latter tend to the permanent happiness of each and all, while 
the former do not, and that conduct will always tend to be ruled by 
happiness; so that the line of right conduct, as the line that leads to 
happiness, will in the long run surely be followed. The question is, 
why ought we to seek permanent happiness rather than transient, or 
why public in preference to private? ‘The superior worth of perma- 
nent happiness over present, of public happiness over private,—what 
vindicates or can vindicate that? Nothing, assuredly, but the voice of 
that reason out of which the agnostic view cancels all final authority. 
Between those who follow the mere natural impulses of our conscious 
being and those who are guided by its spiritual or ideal summons, 
there can be no criterion of real difference when all its processes are 
once brought down to the common level of being mere experiences 
of ours, shut in to their own ongoings, shut out from known access 
to the universal light. ‘‘If the light that is in thee be darkness, how 
great is that darkness!” 


BEARINGS OF PHILOSOPHY UPON RELIGION. Eee 


In view of this, the rising tendency among certain votaries of lib- 
eral religion to essay the founding of religion and morals on an 
agnostic basis is a strange phenomenon, a singular delusion. Such 
would-be religionists and moralists stand upon a platform from which 
all supports have been cut away. Conduct, in the last resort, has no 
source of guidance but cognition; no motive that will assuredly and 
permanently control it but du¢y; none, that is, short of the sacred 
authority imparted to precepts by their known issuance from the 
Eternal Intelligence, or God. ‘The permanent removal of that Eter- 
nal Intelligence from the scope of our cognition, the cancellation of 
God’s indwelling in our normal knowing, is the necessary desecration 
of all conduct and all ethics. The movement in favor of a non- 
theistic or purely humanistic religion rests, no doubt, upon the sin- 
cere persuasion of its advocates, that the sacredness of duty remains, 
even when God, free agency and immortality have ceased to be 
ascertainable realities. ‘The movement is proposed in the interest 
of placing religion and duty beyond the reach of all possible assaults 
of scepticism. Its advocates would say: Let scepticism, if it will, 
go to the last extreme; we lodge duty in the indestructible shelter of 
human nature, pure and simple, and we rescue religion from every 
possible peril by identifying it with duty finally and outright. But 
that they should, in one breath, empty human nature of all absolute- 
ness, reduce it to utter relativity and incertitude, and still assert the 
inviolable quality of the duty that they would found on that limited 
nature alone, is a surprising instance of the inconsequence and over- 
sight by which men signalize their lapses from reason. Indeed, the 
lapse is in this case so astounding, and yet so prevalent in the phil- 
osophic temper of the time, as to constitute one of the puzzles of 
psychology, both individual and social. It can only be explained by 
the fact that the direct feeling of duty is so strong, that it makes 
most minds oblivious of the theoretical consequences necessitated 
by agnosticism. But of these theoretical consequences the practical 
outcome is finally inevitable. ‘The mere habit of duty and devotion, 
bred in an environing life derived from ages of profounder faith and 
‘Insight, may keep the individual agnostic theorist long secure in his 
own practical allegiance, or even permanently so; but what is to be 
the moral and religious tone of younger generations, educated under 
the distinct and positive teaching that the thing called duty and 
religion has no root but in human nature, and that this nature has 
no traceable hold upon absolute truth? 


52 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


And yet, irreconcilable with the vital principle of religion as phil- 
osophy in its agnostic stage unquestionably is, and desirable as the 
harmonizing of philosophy and religion by a conclusive reduction of 
agnosticism may be, such a reduction is not at all possible by the 
short and easy logic of ordinary religiosity. On the one hand 
there 1s a fatuous pietism to which agnosticism seems even friendly 
to religion, by the guze/us it appears to put upon the pretensions of 
‘carnal reason;” and, on the other, if the hostility of agnosticism to 
religion is realized, the popular religious logic reckons it a baseless 
or wilful illusion, capable of being readily and ignominiously dis- 
pelled. 

To pietism of the former kind, agnosticism makes the plausible 
appeal of seeming to demonstrate, with such satisfactory finality, 
the radical helplessness of unaided human reason, and the radical 
need of a miraculous and zfse dixz¢ revelation from God. But such 
pietism feebly and stupidly overlooks the fact that the agnostic prin- 
ciple cancels the being of God from the field of our possible ascer- 
tainment, and thus deprives us of any known source for such 
revelation. Besides, even assuming the certainty of God’s existence 
to remain, the absurdity is committed of supposing that an absolute 
revelation can be made through the forms of a cognitive faculty 
already adjudged relative and limited. The supposed revelation 
must, in any case, be uttered in the terms and under the constitutive 
principles of our human understanding; and if these are all proved 
merely specific and relative, they cannot but taint every attempted 
revelation with their limitation, and thus exclude us permanently 
from any knowledge of the divine will. 

On the other hand, the pietistic logic that argues the baselessness 
and illusoriness of agnosticism is shallow and frivolous. The assump- 
tion here is, that there is really nothing in agnosticism, and that it 
only needs to have its hollowness exposed; that it may be refuted 
outright and utterly, in the sense of being shown to have no footing in 
genuine thought at all. But the agnostic procedure is really scientific, 
and the agnostic argument constitutes a positive and permanent con- 
tribution to the development of philosophy. In that side of phi- 
losophy—an indispensable and valid side—which is occupied with 
the problem of the origin, the nature and the scope of human 
knowledge, the steps of inquiry and result that constitute the 
agnostic argument are. necessary and inevitable. They form an 
indestructible part of the genuine science of cognition, Whether 





BEARINGS OF PHILOSOPHY UPON RELIGION. 5G 


they complete that science is a pertinent and, indeed, a vital ques- 
tion; but that the science of knowledge cannot be completed without 
them, nay, that they contribute essential fibres of the material that 
enters, and must enter, into the positive constitution of knowledge, 
is a truth that ought now to be recognized on all hands, and by no 
persons more than by the friends of religion. Such refutation of 
agnosticism as is scientifically or philosophically possible will not 
consist in scattering the bases of agnosticism to the winds, but in 
showing that they do not fill out the scope of the problem of knowl- 
edge; that there is a clearly indicated superstructure, for which they 
are only the foundation; and that the obstacle which prevents the 
agnostic from believing in the possibility of that superstructure is 
determinable and removable. The only real refutation must be built 
upon the undisturbed and undisturbable foundations of agnosticism 
itself. 


It behooves us, then, to take an accurate though necessarily a 
rapid view of what the agnostic foundations really are. And let us 
note, at the start, that by the agnostic thinkers most widely known to 
the English-speaking public—by Herbert Spencer and by Comte, 
through his brilliant disciple, Frederic Harrison—they are delineated 
for us with less of solidity, and with far less depth of seating, than 
they really have. Their true quality in these respects we must seek 
in the investigations of Hume and Kant. 

The inquiry that appears to end in agnosticism has two stages, 
which have been properly enough named the empirical and the 
transcendental. The working out of the former is the service that 
the English school of thought has rendered to philosophy in its 
modern development; the completion and criticism of the latter is 
the contribution to the same development made by the German 
school. The one seeks to determine the constitution and the limits 
of knowledge, on the theory, carefully studied and presumptively 
established, that all our knowledge is obtained from experience; the 
other conducts the same inquiry upon the theory, at first hypothetical, 
but afterwards definitively established, that all the pvznciples of cog- 
nition—those roots of relation among objects without which the 
latter would be unintelligible—so far from being derived from expe- 
rience, are consditutive of it, and themselves originate in the mind. 
These principles thus transcend experience, not only in the sense of 
lying at its root and conferring all its character upon it, but in the 


54 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE, 


sense of consequently carrying our knowledge, by their unity and 
continuity, from the uniform experiences of the past to the recurrence 
of these in the future. For these reasons they are called transcen- 
dental, and the same name is consequently given to the second stage 
of the agnostic development; while, for a counter reason, the first 
stage is called empirical. The one refers all our knowledge to 
experience—to presentations supposed to be conveyed to the mind 
from a foreign world of objects; the other refers it, in the last 
analysis, to certain principles a priovi—to constitutive ideas origin- 
ating in the mind, and carried forth to the world of objects and 
applied there by the mind itself. How the mind can warrantably 
and validly apply its self-originated principles of relation and order 
to a world of real objects, is a natural and pertinent question. And 
in modern thought, when Hume put it as the culmination of his 
destructive criticism, it proved an epoch-making question; for Kant’s’ 
whole philosophic product may well be described as an answer to it, 
taking the form and dimensions of a system. 

The relation of the Kantian stage in the problem of knowledge to 
the stage completed by Hume is therefore not that of antagonistic 
refutation, but that of critical supplementation. Kant follows Hume, 
not to cancel, but to absorb into a larger and exacter view; not to 
destroy, but to fulfill. The result of the entire mental movement 
begun by Hume and closed by Kant, is the apparent reduction of 
cognition to the idiosyncratic function of a special being called man, 
and the strict limitation of its field to the bounds of experience— 
to objects presented, or presentable, by the senses. Hume’s English 
predecessors had maintained the somewhat loose proposition that all 
our zdeas—including those of space, time, substance and cause—are 
derived from experience; that is, from the presentations of sense- 
perception. Hume, more exact and subtle, says: No; not all our 
zdeas, but all our real knowledge, not al/ our ideas, but all that have 
any basis in vealzty—any truly objective reference or instructive sig- 
nificance. How, he argues, can it be otherwise? In the impressions 
of sense, we are in the only world of reality; when we enter the world 
of ideas, we enter a region of comparative unreality. The idea is 
at best but a faint copy of the vivid impression of sense; and there 
are ideas that are altogether artificial. Such are all abstract ideas, 
so called; among which space and time, in their pretended universal 
meaning, must be reckoned. ‘These abstractions, indeed, are not 
ideas at all, of any proper sort, but are simply zames, employed in a 


BEARINGS OF PHILOSOPHY UPON RELIGION. 55 


general (z. ¢., loose, indefinite and indifferent) way, for any particular 
idea, of a character resembling others. And there are ideas still more 
purely artificial ‘The abstractions are baseless nominal universals, 
standing counter, however, to real particulars; but there are ideas, such 
as substance and cause, that do not find even an illusory suggestion in 
experience. There is no experimental, sensible evidence whatever 
for the power of one event to produce another; there is nothing 
experimental but the seguence of the event called the effect after the 
event called the cause. So much for the artificial nature of the idea 
of cause; and the idea of substance is only a deposit or precipitate 
of that of cause. We frame the idea of substance in answer to the 
requirement for a cause of the sense-impressions that occur and 
recur in a definite grouping; that is all. 

But the great significance of Hume’s critique of knowledge lies in 
his discovery of the all-embracing inferential function of the idea of 
cause. ‘The question of the scope and value of our faculty of cog- 
nition turns, of course, entirely on that of our power of generalization. 
The mere apprehension of the isolated single fact of sense is without 
significance. If our power of cognition cannot compare, combine, 
and generalize, it is useless; the element of universalization—gener- 
alization that compasses the law of real future fact—is the nerve and 
secret of zztelligence. ‘The power to go beyond the mere evidence of 
sense, and yet to gather, say possibly from that evidence, the hint to 
an inference that still keeps the true line of reality—this is the strain 
absolutely essential and determinative in the value of cognition. Yet 
how, for matter of fact, can we possibly go beyond the senses? Caz we 
attain the universal factor in cognition by any principle objectively 
valid? Such are Hume’s subtle questions. The chief inquiry, he 
declares, in reference to the scope of real knowledge is this: How 
many, and which, of our ideas are authentically traceable to an origin 
in experience, the only origin objectively valid? And, when we come to 
the region of human science—the region of general and professedly 
predictive judgments—how are we to measure the claims of that? How, 
except by ascertaining through what mechanism of ideas it is that this 
generalization is effected? In answer to this inquiry, Hume shows 
with masterly completeness that the entire mechanism of professedly 
objective inference is worked by the single principle of causality. 
All the professedly predictive sciences of nature, from mathematics 
downward, are simply expressions of our assumption that there is a 
necessary and irresistible connection between antecedent and conse- 


56 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


quent, as cause and effect. And the whole of metaphysics, whether 
we consider the question of the soul—its real existence, permanent 
identity, freedom, and immortality; or that of God—his existence and 
attributes; is constructed inferentia!ly out of the same principle. In 
short, by the principle of causality, and by that alone, is it that we 
pass beyond the limits of experience: whether beyond the limits of 
actual sense-impression to the anticipation of the order and sequence 
of future sense-impression; or beyond the bounds of all possible expe- 
rience, to assertions of the divine existence and attributes, or of our 
spiritual personality, our responsibility to God for infinite perfection, 
and our immortal destiny. 

What then becomes of this professed objective knowledge, when 
we realize the artificial character of this principle of causality, as Hume 
has previously exposed it? Causality has assuredly no foundation in 
the impressions of sense; it is the figment of the mind itself, as 
Hume phrases the case; of the mind acting in its function of phantasy 
or imagination. Yet it is a phantasm that cannot but arise, so long as 
our minds continue as they are. But how, or why, should we believe 
that this insuppressible impulse of the phantasy has any objective 
validity ?—or even objective bearing? Asmen of mere natural spon- 
taneity we would of course follow its leadings blindly; but as men of 
reason, as philosophers, why do we not become disabused of the 
illusion? We now know, as reasoning men, that from the nature of 
its origin strict causality has no ascertainable application to the 
objective world, and can have none; why, then, do we not cease to 
attach any objective import to it in practice? Why do we not con- 
form our conduct to the only scientific conviction concerning our 
knowledge,—namely, that it is absolutely restricted to the appre- 
hension of the sense-impression of the transient present moment? 
Our failure to do so, answers Hume, is the effect of habit or custom. 
Constant sequence of a particular antecedent and consequent is a 
matter of objective experience. ‘This apparent verification of the 
causal proclivity of the phantasy, repeated and repeated, dulls our 
perception of the merely subjective character of the universal causal 
judgment, and hardens the belief that it is really objective. 

Thus the apparent result of this subtle and essentially flawless 
investigation of Hume’s is this: We are incapable of a predictive or 
universal knowledge even of the events of this world, even of the 
world of experience; of the eternal world—of the soul, of God—we 
can know absolutely nothing. The particular of sense, its isolated 





BEARINGS OF PHILOSOPHY UPON RELIGION. 57 


single impression, we can apprehend; we can even have a tentative 
expectation of its recurrence in the future, conjoined as in the past 
with its antecedent or consequent ; this expectancy is however only 
belief, and not in the least knowledge. But with respect to the 
world beyond the senses—the world of spirit—we have not the possi- 
bility of this gwas¢ cognition even. There the causal phantasy works 
pure and simple ; there we have not the shadow of even an illusory 
verification; and there, consequently, the constructions formed by the 
cqusal principle are as baseless as the principle itself. 

In making, now, our transition to the Kantian development of 
agnosticism, we must not overlook the most remarkable outcome of 
Hume’s research. ‘This is, that Hume has really cancelled the bald 
empirical theory,—the theory that a// our knowledge is derived from 
experience. For he shows, first, that only our valid or objective 
knowledge is so derived; and, next, that this objective knowledge is 
absolutely restricted to the impression of the passing moment. But 
such isolated sense-apprehension is not kuow/dedge ; nor would any of 
us ever think of applying that name to it. Experience, then, we 
have discovered through Hume, is not an adequate basis for any real 
knowledge. But then, says Hume, what is >—or what caz be? Surely 
the mind, out of its own spontaneous activity, its own phantasy, 
cannot beget knowledge of objects foreign to it?—that exist inde- 
pendently of it? 

And now the drift of Kant’s criticism of Hume is briefly this: That 
his scepticism of human understanding is on the one hand not as 
profound as it ought to be, and on the other not as discriminating. 
Hume shall be proved to have had weightier right than he himself 
supposed, when he shut human understanding out of the world that 
transcends the senses; but, in his assault upon the sciences of nature, 
he shall be shown to have been quite aside of the mark. Our predictive 
knowledge of nature shall be duly vindicated and explained; we shall 
be demonstrated capable of objective knowledge in the world of 
sense,—knowledge at once universal and necessary,—and this, too, 
by virtue of that very mental spontaneity from which Hume argues 
our necessary ignorance of real objects. But by the very argument 
that opens the sensible world to our predictive cognition, all our 
predictive knowledge shall be rigorously confined to that world; and 
the world of the supersensible, the absolute world, shall be closed to it 
forever. Closed, not indeed to the faith (or fea/¢y) that does uncon- 
ditional homage to the moral law; but, to the intellect that sees,— 
yes ; and irreversibly, 


58 | PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


Kant may be regarded as, in effect, accepting from Hume the relega- 
tion of all the formative principles of knowledge to an origin in the 
mind. It is his peculiar work to have set the means in train for vin- 
dicating them as belonging to objective reason instead of to subjective 
phantasy. In addressing ourselves seriously to Hume’s question— 
flow are judgments concerning matter of fact possible by mere reason, 
it becomes forthwith obvious that such judgments cannot be possible, 
if what are known as objects of experience are things independent of 
the mind—things as we might suppose them to exist in themselves, 
apart from being perceived, if such were possible. Yet the cardinal 
forms of cognition—space, time, substance, cause, etc.—being un- 
questionably present in inner experience, mingling in the apparent 
character of outer experience, and being by apparent evidence of that 
experience verified as predictive principles of relation among objects, 
there is a rational and insuppressible demand for an explanation of 
all this. Hume’s explanation of our belief (in his view groundless) 
in the objective character of causality, will not meet the fact inthe case. 
The illusion as to the objective character of the causal relation, if 
illusion it be, is practically irresistible. Prove as we may that 
causality is nowhere evidenced by external sense-perception, and 
argue as we may from this that it must be the mind’s own spontaneous 
figment, and therefore non-objective, we still always find the illusion 
of its objective character rise when we are in presence of an event 
which we have once actually apprehended as connected with another 
in the relation of cause and effect. Were the causal conjunction 
merely subjective, as Hume supposes; were it in the phantasy alone, 
and did objects of experience really not conform to it; were the fixed 
persuasion that it holds good of objects the result of mere habit; 
then that persuasion might certainly be broken up, and the illusion 
dispelled. . The irreducible persistence of the illusion, even in the mind 
that has fallen, like Hume’s, into a profound theoretic doubt of the ob- 
jective bearing of therelation, shows that the belief in that objective bear- 
ing is as organic in the mind as the mere form of the relation is. The 
form and its objectivity are therefore both alike asserted by the spon- 
taneity of the mind; or, more briefly, both are organic in reason; and 
it only remains to satisfy the critical judgment that it is possible so to 
conceive of the nature of empirical objects as to explain how a prin- 
ciple can be at once purely of the mind and yet also objective. ‘The 
answer to this query, when once given, as it is by Kant, seems obvious 
enough. Clearly, no principle belonging to the mind a@ fviord can 


BEARINGS OF PHILOSOPHY UPON RELIGION, 59 


apply universally and necessarily to objects—as space, time, causality 
are unquestionably taken to do—unless it is a s¢we gua non condition 
of the possibility of the objects. And, just as clearly, no a priord 
principle of the mind can be a condition of the possibility of objects 
independent of the mind. From which it follows that the only 
hypothesis upon which the a pvzorz and yet objective character of the 
principles of cognition can be rendered intelligble is, that the objects 
of experience shall be regarded, not at all as things in themselves, 
independent of the mind, but simply and purely as phenomena—as 
conscious presentations within the mind itself. In short, if the mind 
by its organic equipment of principles is to have predictive, or uni- 
versal and necessary, knowledge of the objects of experience (that is, 
if it is to have any real knowledge of such objects at all), those 
organic principles must be constitutive of those objects; they must enter 
into the very composition or make-up of the objects; and only zz so far 
as they do, only zz so far as the objects are by them constituted, will 
there even then be possible any predictive, general, and real cognition 
of them by means of said principles. In so far as other elements 
may enter into the make-up of the objects, the latter will remain un- 
knowable @ priovz. As to such elements, if such there be, objects will 
be knowable only by the dead and insignificant de facto presentation 
in the isolated moment of sense to which Hume would reduce per- 
ception entire. Only those properties which can be determined a 
priori, by the pure interaction of the organic principles of the mind 
upon each other, will be truths necessarily and universally known of 
the objects constituted by those principles; for nothing can be neces- 
sarily known of the objects, but what follows in virtue of the principles 
being conditions of the possibility of the objects. But if the organic 
principles of the mind are conditions of the very existence of empirical 
objects, then all properties of these principles must likewise be con- 
ditions of that existence; or, such properties will be predictively and 
necessarily known as properties of the objects also. Now, the principles 
will be conditions of the existence of the objects if the latter are 
simply phenomena in the mind; and, otherwise, they will not and 
cannot be such conditions. For on no other terms can the organic prin- 
ciples of the mind enter constitutively into the objects; as the mind, 
of course, cannot determine anything @ priori except its own phe- 
nomena. It cannot thus determine, for instance, an object existing 
(suppose) independently of it; but only the form or manner under 
which such object shall appear in it. 


60 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


But this remarkable hypothesis of Kant’s, that owr world of 
external nature is but an ideal world, wrought in us, with all its 
laws, by the operation of the principles inherent in our minds, is 
not proved by the happy suggestion that it can give, as it alone can 
give, objective validity to principles lodged by Hume in the feigning 
spontaneity of the understanding. ‘The principles would become 
valid in a real world of phenomenal objects, could we prove the 
world of experience to be actually of that ideal nature. Or, if we 
could somehow make out, independently, the objective character 
of causality and the other principles, then the ideal character of our 
world would of necessity follow. The latter alternative is mani- 
festly impossible ; how, then, are we to proceed toward vindicating 
the objective bearing of the principles by establishing the phe- 
nomenal or ideal character of the system of nature? We cannot 
to-night follow Kant in the intricate but surprisingly original and 
interesting details of his argument. Let it suffice to say that he 
shows the counter hypothesis, of the existence of the world of 
experience as a world of things in themselves, to involve reason 
either in manifest fallacies or else in a system of self-contradictions. 
But both these results are at once avoided, if the ideal theory of 
nature is adopted. Thus this revolutionary view, which proposes to 
try the possibility of knowledge on the assumption that in cognition 
the object conforms to the mind, instead of the mind to the object 
(as hitherto assumed), is established by the crucial test that the 
counter theory makes reason belie its own nature, while the new 
hypothesis maintains it in harmony with itself. 

But the argument limits knowledge to objects constituted by the 
mind itself. How, then, in regard to knowledge of the supposed 
absolute objects, the things in themselves, of which the cognizable 
objects of experience are the phenomena? How, also, as to knowledge 
of the soul itself? Above all, how as regards the knowledge of God? 
Plainly, the argument proves such knowledge impossible ;—unless, 
indeed we count it sober philosophy to say that the principles 
organic in the mind are constitutive of things in themselves—things, 
that is, independent of the mind. And were this not a self-contra- 
diction, and could we thus dispose of the material part of absolute 
reality, shall we venture to invade the spiritual part, and say that the 
principles originating @ priord in the mind are, in their turn again, 
constitutive of the mind that originates them? Is not this also a 
plain contradiction? Above all, when we come to the knowableness 


BEARINGS OF PHILOSOPHY UPON RELIGION. 61 


of God, dare we say that our organic principles are conditions of 
Ais existence ?—that they really constitute his being ?>—in short, confer 
existence upon him? ‘Thus the demonstration of the relativity of 
all our possible knowledge appears to be finally made out. God, 
the soul, we know not, cannot know at all; not even, with certainty, 
that they exist. Nature and the knowledge of nature are but 
phenomena and the cognition of phenomena. We are shut within 
a world of mere experience, whose circuit we seem to know, and 
whose course we can predict. But after all, this seeming penetration 
into law, in a world shut into its own sphere, and shut out from pos- 
sible intelligible communication with the world of absolute realities, 
only serves to deepen our sense of the intricate web of illusion in 
which we appear to be inextricably entangled by our very nature. 


Such is the subtle and, in the main, rigorous line of argument by 
which agnosticism has won its historic place in the science of 
knowledge. If any defect is to be pointed out in the part of it 
furnished by Kant, it is merely that he secures an undue advantage 
over Hume in regard to our predictive knowledge of phenomena. 
This apparent advantage is upset, however, by a slip in his theory 
of the natural world. The hypothesis, to which he tacitly holds, 
that the world of sensible experience has a part of its ground in a 
world of material things in themselves, really defeats the certainty of 
prediction in nature, as it requires us to think the course of nature 
as resulting from the interaction of our @ priort forms and the 
unknowable laws of the things in themselves. A course of events 
depending even in part upon an unknowable factor must itself be 
unknowable. The correction of Kant’s inaccuracy here would only 
reduce his final result into greater accord of detail with Hume’s ; so 
that the agnostic outcome of the latter is only strengthened by 
Kant’s profounder and more intricate analysis. This leaves our 
nature stripped of all knowledge of laws, even of phenomena, by 
the apparently necessary severance of its connections with the 
world of absolute realities. 

Here we might well take leave of our subject, if-our purpose were 
simply to become impressed with the force of agnosticism. But 
now that I may hope my first aim is not unaccomplished, of suffici- 
ently emphasizing the antagonism that lies between agnosticism and 
religion, and of verifying the intellectual vitality of the agnostic 
position, I should do violence to my own feelings, and doubtless 


62 . PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE, 


disappoint your hopes of the positive harmony of religion and 
philosophy, were I to refrain, even at this late hour, from adding a 
few words on the method by which philosophy surmounts agnosticism. 

In this method, the first step is to rectify Kant’s needless and 
harmful acceptance, from uncritical common-sense and from _ philo- 
sophic tradition, of a partial basis for the world of experience in an 
of assumed world of material things in themselves—the basis, namely, 
of sensations somehow gzvez to us from that world. By this correc- 
tion, dropping these needless and unwarranted things in themselves, 
we arrive at a strictly idealistic theory of the world of sensible 
objects. Such objects now become organic phenomena of mind, 
and are construed as being, in their entire and proper nature, nothing 
but such phenomena. Matter is thus reduced to an existence, not 
unreal or illusory, but relatively real; real, that is, as a real or organic 
phenomenon of mind. It thus returns to its normal place of 
dependence on intelligent spirit—the place assigned to it by our 
profoundest natural judgment as well as by this our later judgment 
under philosophic criticism. But this primary step in rectifying 
Kant is only a step in the interest of his self-consistency. It restores 
to him the improvement upon Hume, which was one of his main 
contentions, that the possibility of an @ przov¢ and universal or 
predictive science of nature shall be vindicated. Still, the first 
effect of this is only the higher organization of agnosticism. We 
possess now, to be sure, a world of phenomenal experience, in which 
knowledge is possible, so far as a sure foresight of the course and 
order of such a phenomenal world may be said to constitute know- 
ledge; but such cognition is, after all, only formal. It possesses 
no real grasp upon ¢ru¢/i—upon relations as universal or divine 
intelligence sees them. It is as yet nothing more than the specific 
human consciousness taking note @ priori of its own wonderfully 
‘complex organism; it is still nothing but a limited selfluminous . 
sphere, bright within, but set in a periphery of impenetrable opacity, 
so that the world absolute is still a world of outer darkness. And it 
is plain that this limit of impenetrable darkness can only be broken 
by somehow identifying the inner ‘‘ light which lighteth” this human 
sphere for “every man that cometh into [its] world,” with the Light 
Eternal which the religious conception places at the source of all being. 
But how is this possible? We are not in immediate possession, 
philosophically, of the assurance that the Ground of Things is 
personal and intelligent ; that is a truth, if a truth at all, which must 


BEARINGS OF PHILOSOPHY UPON RELIGION. 63 


be woz by philosophy. And, as we have already seen, the argument 
that vindicates the relative or phenomenal objectivity of our a priori 
cognition in the world of experience seems to rest on the principle 
that our mind can know nothing but that which its a prior? forms 
create. And while Kant, when in the remotest ascent of his analysis 
he traces the @ grvtorz organism of our intelligence up to the primacy 
of three Ideas—those of the soul, of the cosmic unity, and of God 
as the unity of all possible perfections—might say with us that the 
sovereign Idea of all these three is constitutive in the world of 
sensible objects, still, as he says, we do not see how it can be con- 
stitutive of an objective Being corresponding to itself, in the way 
that causality, time, and space are constitutive of the empirical or 
phenomenal objects that correspond to them. Of causality, time, 
and space as existences, it is a sufficient account, apparently, to 
say that they ave nothing but the @ priori forms of our human 
phenomenal consciousness ; and of phenomenal objects, it is also a 
sufficient account to say that they ave nothing but certain subjective 
data, called for convenience sensations, organized into a system or 
world by these a priovi forms. ‘The objective “ exzstence” of such 
phenomenal realities is thus empirically given in the mere fact of 
sensation, while their knowable zature is conferred upon them 
wholly by the cognizing mind. But how can the being of a hyper- 
phenomenal or absolute existence be given in experience? Sucha 
giving of it isa clear absurdity. And if it is not so given, are we 
prepared to say that its Idea, even at the summit and throne of our 
intellectual and perceptive organism as we have found it, is a suff- 
cient account of its existence ?—just as the formative presence of 
causality, space, and time in our consciousness is a sufficient account 
of their existence ? 

And yet, why not? What is meant by the primacy of the Divine 
Idea in the organism and constitution of our mind and its objective 
world, but the doctrine that the Idea is an absolutely self-existent, 
self-active Principle, out of which the entire universe of our mind and 
its phenomenal-material objects creatively arises? And what have we 
ever meant by the sacred name of Gop, but a First Principle of self- 
active intelligence, the creative ground and root of all things—our 
intelligent spirits and their universe of perceived objects alike? And 
when we include in our analysis of our a prior7 organism, as we must, 
the unconditional imperative of conscience—the imperative in which 
the self-active Idea of the Perfect summons us to absolute allegiance— 


64 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE, 


we discover in the nature of the Supreme Idea the original of that 
principle of moral order which is the secret of the religious aspect of 
life. In every way, then, the Idea found immanent in the inmost 
centre of our conscious being is found to correspond in its attributes 
with our conception of God. It is self-existent, self-active, creative, 
morally sovereign; the Source of all things, the End of all actions, 
the Inspirer of all moral life. It is, as existent in consciousness 
alone, and as the root of thought and perception in us, itself self- 
conscious; that is, personal. In fine, it is the all-grounding, the 
all-embosoming Person of persons; who, in his self-creative, eternal, 
incessant energy of intellectual being, founds and sustains all intelli- 
gences, and the object-universe that forms the necessary complement 
of their consciousness, as the essential terms of his own self-definition. 

Our only surprise, in the course of our philosophic search, is our 
discovery of this Source of All as immanent in our very nature. 
Yet this identification of the root of our higher humanity with the 
Creative Intelligence is the essential doctrine of that Fourth Gospel 
which the church has always silently recognized as the highest ex- 
pression of the Christian Religion. Indeed, it is nothing less than 
the teaching of every greatest Apostle, every loftiest Father, every 
sublimest Doctor of the church. And it is at the same time the 
solution of the agnostic riddle. Thus, by the philosophic ascent to a 
thoroughgoing idealism; by coming to comprehend all existence, 
whether material or spiritual, whether created or creating, as an 
existence of the self-active processes of Thought alone; we reach 
at one stroke a rational comprehension of the nature of the world and 
of knowledge, and deliver ourselves permanently from the depressing 
constraint of the agnostic view. The constraint is broken, not by 
cancelling the agnostic procedure, which we cannot do, but by com- 
pleting the idealistic theory of which that procedure is the valid 
beginning and the partial achievement :— 


“In secret stlence of the MIND, 
Our heaven, and there our GOD, we find.” 


pe, RELIGIOUS: PROBLEM OF TO-DAY. 


ADDRESS BY REV. A. W. JACKSON, OF SANTA BARBARA, 


Within the period of enlightened history, probably there has been 
no age that has not had its philosopher who has sought to solve its 
problem. ‘To what issue are these forces tending? he has asked. To 
what end do we toil? In the long history of man what is the signifi- 
cation of the chapter our time is writing? That is the question. We 
are asking now, what is the relation of this age to the ages? He 
must dwell carelessly among books who, in one form or another, does 
not meet this fascinating inquiry. 

From the nature of the case the answer must be a divination, a 
guess, and not a demonstrative conclusion. Say what we will of a 
science of history it must be constructed backward and not forward. 
The curve of events may be as real as the orbit of a star, but we 
have no mathematics wherewith to compute it. The future may tell 
what this age has done, but no observer can tell what this age is doing. 
The Buckle or Gibbon of the twenty-fifth century may analyze the 
forces that are working now and place their result over against them, 
our x and its value with the sign of equality between. For us, how- 
ever, the determination of that x is impossible; and under the direc- 
tion of an Unerring Wisdom we must be content to toil on somewhat 
blindly. Blindly as to the grand result, but not wholly in blindness, 
for after all our special light is given us. ‘The problem of the age is 
a congeries of problems, some one or two of which it is permitted us 
to toil at, and which from their limitation we may fairly comprehend. 
Thus it is just possible for the statesman to see that his special 
problem as a statesman is the reconciliation of law with liberty—the 
prerogatives of men with the rights of man. ‘The task may indeed 
be an onerous one; so far as he is concerned in the short span of his 
life, an impossible one; but there it hangs, a perfectly distinct and 
glorious ideal before him. It is just possible for the economist to 
see that his problem is to adjust trade and labor and enterprise to 
certain great economic laws. It is just possible for the socialist to 


66 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


see that his problem is to construct a social organism, with needed 
restraints upon the lower and fiercer passions yet stimulative to every 
nobler endeavor. It is just possible for the philanthropist to see that 
his problem is the amelioration of social disparity, the alleviation 
of human misery, through a wisely directed sympathy. It is of 
such problems as these that the age problem is composed, and out 
of the results of our toiling at them, the mysterious zezt-gezst will 
shape the larger answer. ‘These problems in their terms are distinct 
and intelligible. The ciphering at them may be bungling enough; 
mistake and blunder may long vitiate the most patient and laborious 
processes. But there before us is the result to be arrived at, and ~ 
which, like the answer written in the school-boy’s arithmetic, constantly 
warns us of our error. 

It is of one of these special problems that I have a mind to say some- 
thing—one so fundamental and comprehensive that one is tempted 
to regard it to be the age problem itself—the one at any rate by 
which the achievement of our age as it shall at last stand recorded in 
history shall be most vitally affected. I mean the problem of religion. 
As to what this is, men of course will answer according to their sense 
of what the deeper need may be, and I could imagine some Presby- 
terian or Episcopalian or Unitarian speaking, out of denominational 
fervor to make answer, as I once heard a clergyman ina country 
church in Maine, who was sure the kingdom of heaven would come, 
when all men were made Baptists; and then proceeded to give most 
encouraging statistics to show that that millenium was near at hand. 
Some Moody may say that problem is merely one of Evangelization. 
Some thinker may say it is the triumph of a spiritual philosophy over 
materialism. Some other thinker may say it is the redeeming of 
theology from its present chaos by reconstruction according to the 
scientific method. With none of these, as to the general truthfulness 
of his doctrine, is any discussion here to be made. I only urge that 
none of them covers the deeper need, and so the more vital problem. 
That problem is not primarily intellectual but moral. It is, I name it 
- with modesty, but hardly with misgiving, the Reconciliation of the 
Spirit of Truth with the Spirit of Devotion. Other terms may better 
describe it, but these surely are not wide of the mark. The purely 
intellectual problems have their place and very great importance, but 
the primary and weightier emphasis belongs not to them. Our task 
is to bring together thought and reverence, the fearless mind and the 
uplifted heart. | 


THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF TO-DAY. 67 


My language implies a schism, an hiatus, between them. ‘The fact 
is obvious and melancholy enough. It may be well, however, to 
indicate it with somewhat of detail, and to this end let us take a 
midway position between American Orthodoxy and American 
Liberalism, and survey both with friendly criticism. 

Few passages in Roman history have a more fascinating interest 
than that which exhibits the sentiment of that harsh people respecting 
the véstal fires. Symbol to the Roman mind of the life of the state, 
their perpetuation became the warrant and inspiration of perpetual 
hope. Accordingly, when the day of trial came, and Italy was 
overrun with barbarians and the city was subjected to pillage, though 
the patriot’s arm could not stay, the patriot’s heart failed not, for he 
knew that, retired to a secret spot, the vestal still maintained her 
vigils and kept those fires a-burning. A superstition in the Roman 
mind it may have been; it may serve us as a parable of which 
human experience writes large the meaning. As we look into history 
we mark the miracles of achievement wrought by the small and 
feeble, yet mighty in the kindling energy of a pristine and uncor- 
rupted worship; while we might search the record of all time nor 
find one instance of a people which has not declined with its altar. 
What more rational substitute ethical culture may provide it is too 
soon to declare. But the experience of the future must be unlike 
that of any past if any doctrine of rights and duties, however justly 
conceived, or eloquently taught, or practically applied, shall prove an 
equivalent for the quickened sentiments, the kindled affections, the 
soul drawn upward. 

Our fathers founded the state in the wilderness, and within the 
state they reared the church, and within the church as the center and 
the soul of all they placed the altar. It was a rude church they 
reared, a rude altar likewise. ‘The framework of doctrine, though 
well jointed, to our eyes is unshapely, and their prayers and hymns, 
though poured out with unction, did not betoken a refined spirituality. 
With all the ruder features of their worship, however, it was worship, 
and reacted on them as sincere worship must always do. It pre- 
served in them the consciousness of the divine presence, incited 
nobler longings, fostered humility, brought consolations, sanctified 
humble duty, braced them for the hour of trial, which was the 
frequent hour; strengthened faith, nourished hope, and inspired 
courage. If their prayers were crude they came from the depths, 
and were poured into the Infinite Ear, which is not always the wont 


¢ 


68 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


of our more esthetic devotion. If there was a nasal twang in their 
psalmody, it was yet the song of Moses and the Lamb they sung. 

Is there no connection between the altar of the Puritan and the 
valor and fortitude that, deny him sainthood as we may, must for all 
time rank him among heroes ? 

The church of to-day that most nearly represents the doctrinal 
bias of the Puritan—I mean the orthodox body, without respect to 
its divisions—it is fair to say, has held fast to the spirit of his worship. 
Faithful vestal, she has watched the altar fire. Sometimes the 
flame has seemed to flicker, sometimes to flare; often her worship 
seems dull and mechanical; often overwrought, not unmixed with 
cant—‘‘stale, flat and unprofitable”—uninspired, and therefore unin- 
spiring. But this is because she has simple human nature in all its 
conditions to deal with ; human nature at its best, not always on the 
heights; at its medium, only by rare and blessed privilege. The 
failure bears no witness against her effort and ideal. To keep alive 
the flame of devotion, to cultivate prayerfulness, to foster the fervors 
of a heaven-embracing piety has always been her primary and unre- 
mitting endeavor. Often her philosophy has seemed unspiritual 
enough. Inthe main, consciously or unconsciously, I suppose she 
is under the influence of Locke, an atmosphere in which it seems as 
though our spirits could hardly poise their flight, yet in the face of 
philosophy, as it seems to us, declaring the simple oracles of the 
New Testament she affirms the things of the spirit. You take in 
hand some clergyman of the more ordinary type, and subject him to 
a philosophical cross-examination, and he will very likely commit 
himself to a crude sensationalism. You hear him preach, and though 
his discourse be never so arid and commonplace, of three things 
you will be reminded: your soul, your Maker, and the possibility of 
a mystic union of the two. 

Herein, as I conceive, is the real source of her power. Her 
theologies are harsh, we say, yet thousands see them in the light 
which devotion kindles, and in that light they lose their harshness. 
Thousands are drawn to her who hardly take note of theologies at 
all, magnetized by the ardor of her devotion. Thousands are within 
her fold who, sharply questioned, would be found at a wide departure 
from the standards of her faith, yet cannot be persuaded that they 
are out of place. We call them inconsistent, perhaps apply to them 
harsher epithets, forgetting in our theologic zeal that consistency 
may lay in more than one direction. Inconsistent they may be with 


THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF TO—DAY. 69 


the truth they see; yet consistent with the deeper truth they feel. 
When shall we learn that the old mother church is not primarily a 
theological platform, but more than this, far more, an altar. 

This then do we find in the mother church—the altar. The 
culture of the religious sentiment she has never forgotten. We 
criticize her methods, possibly, yet we applaud her purpose; if we 
deny her doctrines, we confess her devotion. If the American people 
have been kept looking up; if the altar is a present fact and not a 
memory, it is mainly through her work. Here is something at which 
the superficial may scoff, and which the cynical may belittle, but for 
which the thoughtful and the candid will be grateful. And something 
more—for in these days things must be said which ought to go 
without the saying—the zeal for the “closer walk with God” has 
kindled what endeavor for man’s practical welfare. I rarely traverse 
the grounds of Harvard College but that Christo et Ecclesia, her 
motto, and the first chapter of her history, floats into my memory, 
To Christ and the Church was that institution dedicated by those 
to whom these were the first concern, but who clearly saw that 
learning should be the ally of piety. To Christ and the Church 
likewise our Yale, our Amherst, our Brown, our Princeton—until 
yesterday all our higher institutions, and to-day our best. What 
benevolences, too, do we find springing up like fairer roses on the 
path of this mother’s history. Nay, more. As we follow up that 
history, to what blessings, treasured in our land before all others, do 
we find her furnishing the impulse? The doubting may deny, but 
the historian is my witness—Public Education and Republican 
Liberty. Cease your disparagement, O garrulous liberal, till, accord- 
ing to your opportunity, you can show a hundredth part of this. 

So much we record in gratitude and affection. We find in the 
mother church the spirit of devotion, not ideally, as we would have 
it, or as she would have it, but at least worthily. 

This, however, is only the half of what we are looking for. We 
turn, then, to contemplate her in relation to the other half—the spirit 
of truth. We raise no questions as to her doctrines, nor the tenacity 
with which she holds to them. That her scholars are explaining all 
departments of knowledge; that her philosophers are toiling in all 
departments of thought, we know, and rejoice in knowing. None 
the less, we have here one or two points of serious criticism. 

The phrase, Spirit of Truth is somewhat vague. It may be used 
in very different senses. It may describe the animating motive of 


7O PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


the scientist as he climbs mountains, or dredges oceans; of the 
missionary, who will deliver his fellow men from error; of the patient 
watcher and waiter, who from whatever hill-top looks eastward that 
he may catch the foregleam of every rising star. It may also describe 
the sentiment that regards not primarily the outward congruity of 
man’s thought, but the finer and deeper veracities of his nature; the 
feeling that bids him say: not first the truth, but evermore to be true; 
let me speak and act the error, but let speech and action be the 
just translation of what is in me. 

This spirit has its enemies. They are lethargy, self-complacency, 
the bias of interest, the bias of party, the bias of dogma. 

The criticisms we have here to offer may seem to some to apply to 
the common human nature, and so in this special application to lose 
somewhat of their force. To church, as church, however, in her pre- 
vailing tone and spirit, we look for the nobler standards, and so must 
judge her by them. How stands she as a watcher and waiter? Has 
her look been prevailingly eastward? Has she been so in love with 
truth that she has run to meet exposure of her errors? As the new 
light has come has she been forward in her welcome? Somehow 
she has acquired a contrary reputation. Men of science charge her 
with hostility, and unfortunately the facts of history, the memories of 
men, sustain the charge. Religion itself can make no opposition to 
science, or to any investigations whatever. To the investigator she 
would always say: Be consecrated, true and bold. Find out for 
me the laws of my Maker; teach me that more worthily I may 
adore. But the mother church, as representing religion, has taken 
the opposite stand. How many of the great thought-shaping dis- 
coveries would have stood could her opposition or even her anathema 
have prevailed against them? It is not against her that she does not 
hasten to embrace every novelty that is labelled science, or endorse 
at first showing every new theory of the Bible any Dutch or German 
scholar may propound. Her fault is that without the warrant that 
can only come from patient and toilsome investigation, without 
awaiting the application of the only methods by which—in the field 
of science—error can be exposed or truth be verified, seeing the new 
theory only in its antagonism to some favorite doctrine, she has 
hastened to array against it her passionate hostility. Hardly could 
it be said that she accepts too late, but that she antagonises, yes, and 
vituperates, too early. When the doctrine of the origin of species by 
natural selection was announced, before men of science had fairly 


THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF TO-DAY. Pl 


got their bearings upon it, church as church confronted it with 
protest, with denunciation, with invective. As we look .back upon 
it now, it is impossible not to feel that the spontaneous antagonism 
of the church to this doctrine sprung not from the scrutiny of facts, 
and seeing that they did not sustain this doctrine, facts of which 
only the scientific eye could read the meaning, but zeal for party, 
zeal for dogma, a spirit resentful, half angry at the announcement of 
a view of nature that threatened to discredit her standards, or compel 
their reconstruction. And her punishment is, that which in like 
conflicts she has so many times endured, the mortification of seeing 
yesterday’s “science, falsely so-called,” to-day recognized in the 
exposition of her theologies, and buttressed by irrefragible Scripture. 
And more than this, and far more harmful, her punishment extends 
to the alienation of the great world outside, on which she aims to act, 
and which it is her fervent desire to magnetize and bless. One such 
mistake might shake her prestige, but she would be forgiven; but 
somehow people feel that so many defeats on the field of scientific 
controversy imply a deficiency as to her candor or her methods. 
Nor does tardy recognition amend for hasty vituperation. A few 
months ago we saw the English Church at the bier of Darwin. It 
was very proper. But though we build tombs to the prophets: we 
are not at once forgiven if we stoned them in the first place. 

How stands she in relation to the firmer and deeper veracities of 
the nature? Her zeal for truth, as she .apprehends it, it is entirely 
superfluous to acknowledge. But even this, in its very energy, if 
not well guarded, may work moral injury of no trifling moment. 
Rome’s persecuting emperors, I suppose, might have pleaded it; the 
Romish Church might have done so even in the darkest chapters of 
her history. It may build churches, found colleges, send abroad 
missionaries, and at the same time tyrannize conscience, tempt 
duplicity, foster make-believe. It may seal the lips to the utterance 
of error; it may draw from them the confession of the truth, and in 
either result corrupt the interior man. 

That high respect for the individual conscience, which ever says 
to man: ‘The truth, important as it is, is not so important as your 
truthfulness; that bids him receive indeed with caution but to confess, 
with fearlessness; that holds it before him that though the error he 
puts outward is bad, very bad, even the truth he smothers shall be a 
taint and gangrene at last; that tempts not to duplicity; that offers 
no premium to hypocrisy,—say what we will, is all too rare. And 





72 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE, 


here, as it seems to us, has always been a serious weakness, in the 
mother church: that in her very zeal for truth—we emphasize this 
motive, though we could hardly assert that it is the only one—she 
has tempted and overridden the veracities of man. ‘That she has her 
doctrinal standards is her right which only a puerile fault-finding can 
call in question; that she visits moral reproach and social obloquy 
upon those who do not conform to them, and especially those who 
depart from them, stands charged against her. ‘That any one should 
be held in reproach for anything save the turpitude of his life seems to 
us a cruel wrong; and when we consider such treatment in the light 
of a corrupting and debasing influence, all that is deepest and holiest 
within us cries Out in remonstrance. Strange that while the believer 
has such difficulty in maintaining his integrity he should dare to 
tempt the virtue of the misbeliever. Yet, when for opinion’s sake 
we take away from a man the esteem of his fellows, by all that is 
dear to him in that esteem, do we not offer a bribe to subservience ? 
Do we not practically say: Be false, and we will give you fellowship 
and good will; be true to your truth, and the consequences shall lay 
heavy upon you? Cast social odium upon infidels and do you not 
tempt them to add to the error of their belief the sin of its denial? 
You cast social scorn upon atheists, and as a consequence is there 
less atheism, or more time-serving and hypocrisy? 

Some of the civil codes of this country and Europe are disfigured 
with enactments forbidding the atheist the right of a citizen to testify 
in court. The theory has been, that not believing in any God an 
oath will not be binding, that therefore there is no guarantee of his 
truthfulness. ‘The theory has been upheld, of course, by the popular 
notion which the church has fostered that only the morally base can 
be guilty of a denial so monstrous. Strange it has not been seen 
that by the very provisions of such enactments any atheists who will 
lie may testify. All he has to do is to stand up and say, ‘“‘I believe,” 
and then take upon his perjured soul whatever perjuries he may 
deem expedient. It is the atheist, whose stalwart integrity breasts 
popular odium, that has given evidence that his faith cannot be 
corrupted; that is, adjudged fundamentally untruthful. 

And as a consequence of the foregoing, too, we mark a reaction 
upon the church from which she suffers not slightly. When a convert 
from orthodoxy passes over to liberalism we confess to an inclination 
to discount his representations of the mother that has reared him. 
As students of evolution it is not always easy to see how, from a 


THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF TO-DAY. 72, 


dishonesty so deep and pervasive there can flow an integrity so 
phenomenal; and we sometimes ask ourselves whether, if the descent 
is so bad, there is not a liability of taint in the blood, and if we are 
not bound to place a higher estimate upon the mother, or a lower 
estimate upon the child. Still, after all such allowance, it is impossible 
to shut our eyes to a temporizing by which her, power is enfeebled 
and her character is compromised. To hold fast to the traditions, 
to retain the symbols, to maintain a standing for unquestioned fealty 
to the faith, creeds how uncompromising are explained by refine- 
ments how ingenious; gulfs, how abyssmal, are bridged by generalities 
how attenuated! ‘This is not our charge merely; it is a condition 
of things which men of fairest mind and unquestioned orthodoxy 
admit, reprove and lament. Strange they do not see that it is pro- 
vided for in that spirit that makes the standard of the faith not only 
the basis of fellowship, but the criterion of character. 

These several items taken together would constitute, we are aware, 
a serious indictment against the mother church, an indictment which, 
though true in substance, were unjust in spirit, if not coupled with a 
recognition of the better instincts within her, and the reform spirit 
which is provoking them to a more aggressive exercise; a recognition 
we therefore hasten to record. And what augments the misfortune 
of the position is the fact that there are multitudes with eyes magne- 
tised to the fault, but with no vision of the virtue that it falsifies, 
with whom thereby her influence is forfeited. With multitudes out- 
side the church it is impossible not to see a feeling towards her— 
sullen, contemptuous, angry,—a feeling they refer some to one, and 
some to another of the shortcomings we have specified. From their 
mood they exaggerate the faults, but none the less they are faults they 
exaggerate; faults which, seen in the kindliest light, are grave. The 
church feels the alienation. Sometimes she charges it to the teachings 
of liberalism, sometimes to the perversity of men’s hearts, and some- 
times to the machinations of the devil, but the nearer explanation is 
in herself. 

We turn to liberalism. To define this or denote its boundaries is 
a difficult thing todo. Plainly to group a Channing and a Martineau 
with a Denton and an Ingersoll is not to classify but to conglomerate. 
Liberalism, as denoting a thought-shaping movement, we may say, 
begun with a group of scholars, whose great impulses we still feel. 
Men they were of fearless and on-pressing intellect. By spiritual 
affinity they drew about them their own; by a beautiful heredity they 


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transmitted after their kind. ‘Their influence is written ineffaceably 
in the intellectual life of America—in her science, her philosophy, 
her theology, her literature. I was a little time ago with a gentleman 
of some reading, but strict orthodoxy, who frankly told me that he 
kept all works of liberal authors from the reach of his family. I 
looked round upon his book-shelves. Bancroft was there, and like- 
wise Motley. A little higher up was Longfellow, beside him Lowell 
and Bryant, and the genial Autocrat was near by. He called my 
attention to Clarke’s Self-Culture, which he had bought for a vade 
mecum for his boy; and wonder of my eyes, I discovered two volumes 
of Emerson! His little girl was reading near by, and a glance 
upon her page showed me she was holding communion with Miss 
Alcott. Possibly, if that gentleman sees these pages he may learn 
that these are liberal authors. His case, I fancy, illustrates that of 
multitudes who would keep their family reading within orthodox 
standards. It likewise suggests the impossibility of forming a re- 
spectable library of American literature in which liberal writers shall 
not take the leading place. 

That the later generation of liberal teachers reaches the stature of 
the earlier it were, perhaps, hazardous to say. But so far as our 
preachers are concerned it is fair to allow them a studious zeal and 
a fearlessness of inquiry. As watchers and waiters their look is east- 
ward, some from lowly and shadowed valleys indeed, but many from 
watch-towers on the mountain-tops. Facile to change, they follow 
the footsteps of the investigator; for the newest criticism, for the 
latest science they reach eager hands. ‘They acquire a certain respect 
and influence, from the impression they give, that however attached 
to certain forms of thought there will be little tampering on their 
part with the simple verities of things. Take the example of our 
earnest friend who is making Unity Pulpit illustrious. Half the 
thrill he exercises upon those who hear and upon those who read 
him, springs not from his brilliant expositions, but from the feeling 
he somehow inspires that what he reports is the last thing his watchful 
eye has seen; that even the evolution he expounds so fervidly to-day 
he will to-morrow renounce and trample on if some Lotze shall bring 
a nobler word. 

As to its attitude towards the interior veracities of man the liberal 
church, if not ideal, is fair. ‘That it has its popular standards must 
be confessed ; that it sometimes punishes departure from them cannot 
be denied. In the main, however, as a far preponderating rule its 


THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF TO-DAY. 75 


spirit right here is healthy. Regarding religion as an individual 
affair, its habitual admonition has been: Come not with us, but follow 
as the spirit leadeth thee. Be orthodox, be radical, be of Paul, 
Apollos, Cephas, but be true. Obey Mohammed, but disobey not 
thy indwelling Christ. Deny thy God so far as lips may shape 
denial, but to the veracities of thy soul be true. It is sometimes 
charged against it that it lacks enthusiasm for doctrines, even the 
doctrines on which it is founded. Chance here for criticism doubt- 
less ; yet it is something to say of it that it has tempered zeal to the 
veracities of conscience ; that in proselyting to the faith it has offered 
to time-serving few inducements, to hypocrisy few bribes. 

In these two particulars our liberalism stands fairly for the spirit of 
truth. But how now of the spirit of devotion? How of its altar? 
Where is the kindling fire? I submit that very many of our churches 
are about the last places men should go to, seeking to be quickened 
and energized as to their interior natures. Fine rhetoric most likely 
shall salute the ear; learned discourse on science and the faith; clear 
exposition of text or doctrine; studious analyses of the grounds of 
duty; interesting reports from the fields of controversy; but not the 
oracular and soul-entrancing word. Fair doctrines they tell us that 
we have: God’s Fatherhood, Man’s Brotherhood, Immortal Life, 
Righteousness the Central Law of the Universe; Christ, the type and 
glorious ideal of humanity; yet these are translated to the intellect 
not brought a winning beauty tothe heart. Their grandeur and love- 
liness are not seen, for the higher light plays not upon them. And 
the result,—go to that steepled edifice on the hill-top once filled with 
worshipers and see. Note the scanty audience that files slowly in. 
An anthem is zesthetically chanted; the proprieties of the day are kept 
with the customary devotions; people rise and sit; yet observe the 
soullessness of that decorum. Yes, here is the edifice, and here is 
pulpit; and a minister and a choir sits yonder; and here in the pews 
are men and women in decent dress and hearts within that are capable 
of throbbing. But the church—dead; dead, your excellency ; dead, 
gentlemen; dead, reverends and non-reverends; dead, men and 
women with heavenly aspirations in your hearts,—and only waiting 
for the cerements to be ready for the grave. 

Dark, you say, and hopeless; dark indeed, but not hopeless. I 
believe there is a remedy for all this and much more that awaits to be 
told; else the fair surface on which these lines are traced should not 
be disfigured by them. 


76 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE, 


One step more in the way of analysis, ere the situation is sketched 
and the picture completed. On the borders of liberalism hovers 
another liberalism, self-styled such; a pseudo-liberalism, one is 
tempted to call it. It is found everywhere, but more in the west than 
in the east, where it is awed by older institutions and a more com- 
manding culture. It hovers on the borders of liberalism, and liber- 
alism through the intense individuality it has fostered is in part 
responsible for it. It represents individualism run to seed; carried on 
to that point where men become simply jostling units without any fusing 
principle. But orthodoxy must share the responsibility, partly by the 
alienations she has provoked through the shortcomings we have des- 
cribed; partly through her failure to give of her doctrines any rea- 
sonable account. Stern is their demand that all things shall look 
reasonable, and the suspicion of any element of legend enkindles at 
once an iconoclastic wrath. Because Prometheus is a fable, they 
will have no fire; because Lucifer is a fiction, they would put out the 
stars. 

It is impossible to demarcate it by any lines of opinion. We can 
only describe it by a certain temper. It is hard to write of it without 
seeming to do it injustice; for neither the spirit of truth nor the spirit 
of devotion can it be said to stand for. We speak of it as a pseudo- 
liberalism, for it is the very genius of illiberality, aggressive, harsh, 
bigoted, intolerant; hesitating on no occasion to shock the reverences 
of men. It is the spirit of the older Calvinism minus its uplifting 
reverence; and surely there is no type of Calvinism the world has 
seen from the prevalence of which it should not have more to hope. 

It is not to be denied that one finds here a certain fearlessness of 
consequences, a rugged and uncouth honesty which, in weariness of 
palaver and concession in its harshest and crudest utterances, one may 
welcome; just as in the stifling atmosphere of religious cant, a cold 
blast of profanity would not be always unrefreshing. It is from its 
bitterness and flippancy that one so much recoils. To the church 
and religion, in any institutional sense of the word, it conceives an 
utter and relentless oppugnance. Without stopping to reflect that 
there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in its 
philosophy, with what lofty scorn does it meet the great objects of 
man’s faith and reverence and hope. God—‘‘What is that?” Bible 
—“pshaw!” Christ—‘‘What need of him in a world that has 
Robert Ingersoll?” Prayer; soul; heaven. ‘‘Crawl back into the 
fossildom you crept out of, but talk not of these things now.” Staunch 


THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF TO-DAY. Td, 


believers are they in Darwinism; (yes, great is Darwin, and Denton is 
his prophet.) Yet hardly is it too much to say that they would scout 
it as transparent humbug, were it an article of orthodox faith. 

Much do they talk of science, of which they are likely to have 
about enough to misunderstand. Loud demand do they make for 
its advance, but to this end, so far as we can see, they toil not, neither 
do they spin. Platform phillipics, newspaper thunders write no 
botanies, investigate no geologies. Great outcry do they make 
against sectarian institutions, and one who heeds them might believe 
the Christian sect that founds a college to be in league with the 
Prince of Darkness against the intellect of man. But it is not easy 
to see what better means they are furnishing for the general enlighten- 
ment. Much do they tell of new and advanced thought. Recently 
I stood in one of the repositories thereof, and looked over the books 
and pamphlets that are sent forth with the new illumination. As to 
anything of value there it seemed to me, in the main, very old 
thought, such as is crystallized in such works as those of Paine and 
Voltaire, which could surely be identified in far earlier writers. As 
for the rest how little over which a man of intelligence could spend 
an hour. In season and out of season is their cry for intellectual 
freedom, of which one might imagine them suffering some special 
deprivation. Surely there is excuse for the sarcasm lurking in the 
query as to what avail were further freedom if they make so little 
use of the measure that they have. 

Are they satisfied? Bitterness satisfied? On the sea without 
star or compass, or even port of destiny, and satisfied? No. And 
hardly shall the clergyman so surely offend and alienate them as in 
his spirit and his work to reflect themselves. 

It is not a fancy sketch, the foregoing. For all the salient features 
of it an original could be shown. And yet it will be so read as to 
produce an unjust impression by him who does not see that the 
picture is like that an artist would give of a mountain scenery, 
delineating the bolder and more rugged aspects, and leaving it to 
the imagination to suggest the sheltered nooks and sequestered vales 
and gushing fountains. It is a trend, a tendency we have been 
trying to give account of, and to that end have chosen the bolder and 
harsher outline. He will read injustice into it, too, who finds the 
suggestion of a hardened will, or an unresponsive heart. The off- 
spring alike of orthodoxy and liberalism—of the one this pseudo- 
liberalism has sometimes seemed the dismay, of the other the disdain; 


78 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


but against either it is a standing witness of mistake or incapacity or 
faithlessness. ‘Taken together it figures to our minds as a heaving 
chaos, unlovely to contemplate very likely, but which, touched by 
some transforming influence, shall be found to evolve all things 
beautiful, like the primeval deep under the brooding spirit of the 
Lord. Men and women it comprises, like those who followed at 
the call of Jesus; not learned in the lore of Rabbis nor docile at the feet 
of Scribes; but within them the susceptibilities of the common nature. 
Wife, husband, child, they love and cherish; their appointed spheres 
in the home, in the walks of business, in civic office, they fill and 
honor ; loyal citizens are they, kindly neighbors, faithful friends ; the 
frequent deed of charity they do, temptations resist, and crosses 
bear ; conscious are they of interior needs; waiting, hoping, longing 
are they ; ready to be quickened, sighing to go upward, biding the 
call, listening for the appeal that shall enchant their souls and lure 
them forward. Who, who shall speak the charmer’s word ? 

The situation is outlined ; the inferences from it are fairly plain. 
Orthodoxy and liberalism have between them the religious work of 
the future, and asin the past, orthodoxy the greater part of it. How 
that work shall be done is an engrossing question, and one in which 
the grand issue of the history we are writing has a stake. Unortho- 
dox enough in some of our ways of thinking, we will frankly declare 
we would rather what we deem the errors of orthodoxy should stand 
than that her position should be equivocal. ‘Truth is a very precious 
thing ; but this we see, that the world has managed to get on with 
approximations to it, and after all, as Bishop Berkeley has told us, 
though the cry of all, it is the game that very few run down. 

That she may move forward to this position implies not necessarily 
the reconstruction of her theologies, though in the ferment of the 
times, and especially within her body, this seems inevitable. It does 
imply, however, a new quickening of the Spirit of Truth, which shall 
redeem her from the mistaken ways we have found her pursuing. It 
must lift her above the suspicion that she is unfriendly to the 
investigator—scientific or other. He who exposes her errors she 
must make it plain that she welcomes as a deliverer, not dreads 
as an enemy. Fair as her standards may seem, this spirit must 
teach her that in her own department they alone are applicable. 
Eschatologies can solve no problems of astronomy, no teleologies of 
biology. Theology may be made the queen of the sciences, but 
woe unto that sect that makes her dictator. 


THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF TO—DAY. 79 


It must teach her, too, that truth, dear as it is, is of trifling moment 
compared with interior veracities. Whatever else she does she must 
seduce not these. No temptations to make-believe; no bribes to 
hypocrisy from her. Confess to the error, she shall learn to say, 
but confess what is in you, If you can, come with us, and God 
bless you; if you must, go from us, and God bless you! 

To come to this spirit implies an abatement of the spirit of party, 
a spirit the world can well afford to have abated. Will not such 
reform weaken her power? Where men now suspect, in that better 
day they will venerate. Will not her altar fires wane at its coming? 
Will she lose her heart in the amplitude of her love? 

The work of liberalism, if carried on with less imposing organiza- 
tion, is surely not less important, and in it, likewise, the issues of the 
age have a momentous interest. That work, as we conceive it, is 
not to liberalize Christianity, but to Chvistianize liberality. ‘The work 
of liberalizing—all the intellectual forces of the day are engaged in 
that, and it will go on without us. In the Christianizing, however, 
the demand is imperative that we beara part. The heroes of the 
liberal movement were summoned to a fight for liberty on the line 
of dogma, and with “logic on fire” they made it. It has been our 
weakness to conceive their fight as handed on to us, instead of the 
liberty they achieved, our opportunity. It was their labor to dethrone 
a creed that exercised an unrelenting tyranny. It is ours to build up 
life and character. I do not say the discussion of the old problems 
needs to be heard no more. I do say the burden of our prophetic 
work is not the emphasis of them. I do not say the reconstruction 
of theology on the line of science is not a task that well may engage 
us; but I do urge that we have in hand a task far higher and of 
more pressing moment. Can we enchant this liberalism with life? 
Can we awaken it out of its lethargy? If not, with what grace can 
we ask an enlargement of our boundaries. How shall we break the 
bread of life for multitudes if we cannot keep alive the few we have? 
This pseudo-liberalism—can we lift it from scoff to reverence? Can 
we redeem it from bitterness to peace? Can we offer it the appealing 
and winning vision? ‘This, by natural proximity, is our field, and it 
is wide beyond the apprehensions of most, and the difficulties it 
offers are surely enough to tax our energies and give zest to our 
enterprise. By us, if by any, must that charmer’s word be spoken. 
That word, however, is more insinuating than any our theological or 
philosophical dictionaries can furnish us. The missionary who goes 


8O PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE, 


to this field fails not through the unitarianism or the science that he 
carries, but the Christ he forgets to take along. While he descants 
upon the follies of orthodoxy he humors an antipathy; while he 
discourses of science he may furnish entertainment, but he imparts 
not the influence that shall have regenerating power. 

We need then, primarily, for the furtherance of our work, to revive 
the spiritual element; to fan to a flame our smouldering altar-fires. 
To convert men by argument is an experiment we have tried 
almost to the point of disaster ; something we need to do to reach 
interior sensibilities; something that shall color thought with praise; 
something that shall impart to our philosophies the winning grace 
and beauty of religion. And here we touch, be it observed, the im- 
pulse and condition of all religious movements. Always are they 
kindled from within. Truth, truth, we cry. But truth is cold and 
inert until touched by passion. ‘The true searcher for truth shall he 
be only who meets it with spontaneous surrender—take me, use me, 
abuse me, crown me; aye, thy crown of thorns shall be more to me 
than prince’s coronet. When kindled by such passion men approach 
religious problems, light dawns and reformations come. 

Mere sentiment, says some one. But the world is moved by that. 
Your home is founded upon sentiment. By that and not by laws 
and constables is society secure. We have our ease, our advantage, 
do we not? Our lives, poor and paltry though they be, we will pre- 
serve from peril. Yet have we seen in our day a million men falling 
into rank, follow their insulted flag upon lines of gleaming bayonets, 
and over batteries vomiting cyclones of murder, at the behest of a 
mere sentiment. Mere sentiment do we plead for? It is the senti- 
ment that is the condition of all things great and noble, which is to 
our human nature as the central fires to our mother earth without 
which the summits of the Alleghanies were kissed by the waves, and 
this fair seat of civilization were but the pebbly bottom of the rolling 
ocean. 

A chorus of voices here throws in suggestion; more prayers, 
hymns, sacraments, liturgies; things well and beautiful, no doubt. 
But Mr. Emerson tells us that ‘‘ faith makes us, not we it.” And our 
faith, such as it is, equips us. Sacraments and liturgies for such as 
can use them. But the reform we ask for needs primarily, as it 
seems to us, to take hold upon our preaching. Why should the 
sermon be cast at a level so much lower than our prayers? Why 
should it not chant the pean of all excellence? Why should it not 


THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF TO—DAY. SI 


carry the hearer to the higher altitudes of praise? It may do this, 
when its true function is conceived and its true methods applied. 
What do we preach for, but to appeal to the souls of men? And 
how shall we do this save as we speak its dialect? I submit that 
when we really preach we deal far more with forces than with 
opinions ; less with theologies than with faith, reverence, humility, 
aspiration. It may not be denied that he may talk both entertainingly 
and instructively who regards none of these, but he shall not preach ; 
he shall move no sensibilities. Strange we do not learn that men are 
only uplifted as ideals are ravished; the noblest within them tempted 
upward by angels hovering over them. Where the charmer is, we 
are all susceptible to charms. ‘Theories of music may influence us 
little; yet at one strain of the singer all souls surrender; theories of 
eesthetics may mean not much to us; yet a picture of Raphael’s brings 
us trances of joy. Theories of God, doctrines of Christ, specula- 
tions upon the future, systems of ethics expounded never so justly 
may not lure men upward; but he who can articulate the moral 
sense, who can command the dialect of praise, carries enchantment 
in his words. When the oracles of the soul are spoken, soul responds. 
I do verily believe that could this ideal and this method be carried 
to our pulpits, these slumberous and decaying churches would start 
into life; that by it missionary victories should be won; rude caviling 
giving place to joyful receptivity, and irreverence charmed into 
praise. Speak intellect, and intellect may perchance give heed; speak 
soul, and the stones shall hear you. 

Such has been the method of all the kings of the pulpit from the 
days of Chrysostom to ourown. ‘The pulpit may serve as a platform 
for the dogmatist or him who deals merely in the outward relations 
of things, but it is a throne only for the idealist. 

Ministers complain that their churches will not support them. 
Go, whiner, and consider whether thou dost support thy church; 
whether its courage and its faith are upheld by what thou miscallest 
thy ministries. Depend upon it they will give thee bread when thou 
dispensest the bread of life. They proclaim the doctrine, but life is 
something other than these. They discourse in fervid periods of 
Darwin; but though an admirable philosopher, a poor Holy Ghost 
was he. A little soul, good brethren, is worth all your science. If 
monitors we will have, it is in the bards and prophets of the interior 
nature that we shall find them. For this high service better Jeremy 
Taylor than Sir William Hamilton, better Wordsworth than Mill, 


82 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


better Emerson than Heeckel, better George Herbert than Herbert 
Spencer. Only let us see to it that they are monitors, movers—that — 
is openers of our eyes—charmers of our hearts, 

The lameness and inefficiency of our liberalism, it seems to us, 
must be charged upon its ministry, its faulty conception, its mistaken 
methods ; zos, nos, dico aperte ministri desumus. And while we err 
in not practically recognizing that it is soul we must speak to, we 
likewise err in not perceiving that it is soul that must speak. 
Preaching—spiritual communication—that it is, and nothing poorer. 
But the condition of this, as of all things, is sternly fixed. He only 
can give who has. The very exercise of that high function implies 
that we stand at the shrine with attentive ear to catch the oracle of 
the god within. | 

And more than this that function implies, that each of us, poor as 
he may be, isa spiritual fact unlike every other; charged with a 
message that is his own, and that none other can deliver. Men ask, 
why should we hear sermons when we can read Robertson and 
Parker? Why should they, indeed, but for the fact that the minister 
they should hear is another spiritual potency, and has something 
other than Robertson and Parker. And here is where so many of 
us depreciate and demean ourselves in that we make ourselves 
poorer Robertsons and Parkers by retailing their inspirations instead 
of turning within and publishing our own. 


‘* Look into thine own heart and write; 
Yes, into life’s deep plan.” 


Their inspirations were of heaven, we think, but the Great God 
speaks to our souls as truly as he spoke to theirs. 

And not only does this office imply that we have something of 
our own to give, but that what we can give is really greater and 
better than the Robertsons and Parkers have left behind them. 
They left their printed words, but thou, brother, art a soul. ‘The 
sublime discourses of Channing, believe it, they are not worth a 
fragment of thee. ‘The volumes of Emerson, great as they are, are 
trifles set over against that interior fact, which is thyself. Men shall 
go to Emerson for his lofty thought, but when thou preachest they 
shall receive of thee. Books—what are they compared with the 
oracle thou mayest pour out from thy palpitating soul? Believe, O, 
brother! thou art great, and of thy greatness and nothing meaner 


give, 


THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF TO—DAY. 83 


To bring together these twain so widely apart, the spirit of truth 
and the spirit of devotion, is a daring dream, a good too fair to hope, 
never perhaps more than approximately to be realized. Even for that 
possible approximation let us toil and pray. The smallest of us in 
our fidelity can do something. Nay, who knows what achievements 
may crown at last the endeavors of one steadfast and consecrated 
soul ? 

There is a little story,—a fable, very likely, but not for that reason 
poorer—from which one spirit at least in its buffetings and failures 
has taken solace. In some region of the East a man proposed to 
those about him that they dig away a mountain over which many feet 
must toil to the vales beyond. His proposal was met with jeers; but 
with spade and pick single-handed he commenced the task. Ridicule 
assailed him, but could not vanquish him. Weeks lengthened into 
months, months into years, and still alone and with undaunted 
purpose he held to his work. He was imprisoned for madness; but 
at length released, with purpose unsubdued, he renewed his toil. 
Thus passed his youth; his manhood’s prime he left behind, and old 
age with tottering step and whitened locks had come; still to that 
task he bent his unrelenting endeavor. At length one day a crash 
was heard; acrag had fallen. There starkly lay the old man with 
triumphant face turned up into the sunlight, and pilgrims to this day 
leave grateful offerings on his grave. 


THE PRESENT POSITION AND FUL 
PROSPECTS) QO Fae GELB yale 
REVTCTON: 


ADDRESS BY RABBI ELKAN COHN. 


By way of introduction, I call your attention to the scriptural 
adage which says, in the name of God, “On every place where I 
cause my name to be praised, I shall come to thee and bless thee.” 
Now, this house being devoted to the worship of God and to the 
adoration of his name, hymns of praises ascending here from thous- 
ands of devout hearts to the throne of God, and this conference 
having no other purpose than better to understand and do the will of 
God, we, therefore, may trust in the divine promise that it will be 
fulfilled and God’s blessing come and rest upon us. 

I have been honored with an invitation of your worthy pastor to 
address you on the present position and future prospects of the 
Jewish religion. I appreciate the honor, and am thankful for it. I 
appreciate it as a sign of generous liberality that concedes me for a 
time an audience on this place which is essentially devoted to Chris- 
tian interests under the spiritual direction of a man distinguished for 
his learning, eloquence, and character. I appreciate it as an encour- 
aging and inspiring token of the tendency of our age, to hold in far 
higher consideration the common bonds of love and humanity that 
bind men together, than the narrow tenets of dogmatism that separates 
them, a tendency so beautifully illustrated at this occasion by a 
congregation of enlightened men and women who, though deeply 
impressed with their religious convictions, are not averse to lend a 
willing ear to religious ideas in many respects different from their own. 
We probably all agree upon this point, that the main object of 
religion consists in elevating and ennobling man, and especially in 
cultivating in his mind and heart, the sense of justice, love and 
good-will towards all. ‘There are a thousand influences at work all 
the time that tend to his degradation, and religion in its true con- 
ception has the divine mission to extenuate and, if possible, to check 
their pernicious powers and to direct the thoughts, feelings and 


PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE JEWISH RELIGION. 85 


actions of man, by the power of convincing truth, reason and moral 
persuasion, to goodness and virtue. If the tenets of religion be 
such as to accomplish these great purposes; if the excellency of its 
teaching be verified and exemplified by the facts of history, by the 
judgment of unprejudiced reason, by the experience of every-day 
life ; if the truths it teaches inspires man with a better understanding 
of his duties and responsibilities and an earnest will to be governed 
by them ; if the precepts it inculcates, educates him to unfold his 
best moral powers, to be a faithful husband, a good father, a dutiful 
son, a loyal citizen, an honest laborer, upright in his dealings with 
his fellow man, truthful in his mind, pure in his feelings, noble in his 
character, never swerving from the path of right, virtue and duty, 
strong to conquer himself, and ever willing to promote the interests 
of mankind even at the expense of his own advantages, such a 
religion is indeed a divine institution, an effective instrument given 
into our hands by our father in heaven to save his children from sin 
and spiritual destruction. I doubt not that every religion around us 
claims and endeavors to accomplish these ends, and so we Israelites 
do, and hope to do it as successfully as any. Comparisons and ex- 
amples are odious, and so I refrain from making them, and limit 
myself to the task of the present moment, to speak to you of the 
Jewish religion, to tell you what it teaches in the present state of our 
enlightened age and to leave it to your judgment, whether it is en- 
titled to the respect and consideration of the world. It is needless 
to say that we believe in a supreme being, who is the creator, pre- 
server and ruler of the universe; but it must be said again and 
again, that we are strictly, consistently and uncompromisingly Uni- 
tarians, in the sense that we believe in but one God, and under no 
circumstances, even at the risk of life, are we allowed to pay divine 
honors to any other being besides him. ‘‘ Hear, Israel, the Lord our 
God is one God,” is the only dogma we acknowledge in our religion, 
immutable and incontrovertible, like the laws of nature that the 
human mind must acknowledge and must obey. One God whom 
we shall love with all our heart, to whom we shall be grateful with 
all our soul, whom’ we shall worship and invoke in the joys and 
sorrows of life. One God, who governs and commands us at every 
moment, on whom we depend in time and eternity, from whose hand 
we receive the measure and aim of our destiny, in whom we trust 
life and death, and to whose will we shall feel ourselves entirely de- 
voted. ‘This is the foundation and culmination, the alpha and omega 


86 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


of what we call the religion of Israel. And to keep this belief pure 
and undefiled, to be true and faithful to it, as the salvation of our 
souls, to spread it through the world and to plant it in the heart of 
all nations, this is the mission of Israel, a mission to be performed 
by no other means than by the spirit of its truth, its conformity to 
reason and understanding, and its sufficiency for the purest, most 
devout and most spiritual aspirations. It is in vain and dn idle, 
fruitless waste of time, labor and money, to send out missionaries for 
the conversion of Jews; they certainly can and will never effect what 
fire and sword, hatred, malice, contempt and a systematic persecution 
that lasted for centuries, even to this day, could not accomplish. Do 
not call it bigotry, fanaticism and stubbornness on our side. O, no! 
it is a deep, holy and ideal conviction, nurtured in our souls bya 
thousand ties that bind us with imperishable love to the holy One in 
Israel, and ingrained in our very nature by a bloody martyrdom of 
more than a thousand years. And now I ask you, are those who 
live and suffer and die for a great and noble idea to be despised by 
man and condemned by God? 

To be condemned, Oh, this is a most terrible word and everything 
but religious. It is bad enough that we are compelled, in the interest 
of order, justice and law and for the preservation of society, to take 
a man’s life for a crime he committed; but to proclaim that his soul 
be destroyed, the very essence and spirit of God breathed into man 
to make him an intellectual being, to be destroyed for no other crime 
than a sincere and faithful devotion to his religious convictions which 
man is unable to change like the garment of his body, without being 
false to his innermost nature—such a principle in the name of re- 
ligion is an infamy, an outrage upon humanity and a blasphemy upon 
the divinity which we adore and worship as the supreme justice and 
the highest love. And pray by what authority is this sacrilegious 
thing of boundless arrogance sanctioned? By the Bible? I would 
rather tear its pages to a thousand shreds and cast them to the winds, 
than submit to a divinity of such a fiendish and revengeful nature. 
I should feel sorry if there be some one in this enlightened congre- 
gation who feels offended at my words, but my heart bleeds in 
thinking of the terrible horrors that were heaped upon my people in 
consequence of this fatal doctrine which in tens of thousands of 
churches proclaims in the name of God, that the Jew, because having no 
faith in Christ, be he ever so good and true, and pure and virtuous, his 
life ever so distinguished by the highest and noblest traits of mind and 


PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE JEWISH RELIGION. 87 


heart and character, ever so benevolent and charitable and self-sac- 
rificing to right and duty, is forever rejected by God, and cursed with 
the stamp of his eternal wrath. Iventure to say that there is not one 
synagogue throughout the world, not one congregation that worships 
there, be it composed of the lowest in mind and the most bigoted, where 
a rabbi, a teacher in Israel, would dare to stultify himself by a similar 
assertion. His Bible teaches him to respect and honor in every 
human being the image of God; his Bible nowhere tells him that he 
who believes is safe and he who doubts or denies is lost; his Talmud 
teaches him that the pious of all nations inherit eternal life and bliss, 
and his common sense tells him that the test of piety is not the belief 
he professes, but his actions, his good and virtuous life. Of course 
we believe in divine justice, rewarding the good and punishing the 
wicked, that God’s retributive justice reaches every one partly in this 
world already, and partly in the world to come; but we emphatically 
deny that revenge is the object of divine punishment; we assert that 
even divine punishment leads to salvation, and has no other purpose 
than the amelioration of the soul and its purification from sin and 
error. 

It is furthermore a characteristic trait of our religion, that it is not 
based upon faith but upon knowledge. There is in the whole 
kingdom of the Hebrew language, so exuberantly rich in religious 
expression and sentiments, not one word that denotes faith in the 
spirit we take it; but the Bible never tires in the injunction, ‘‘ Know 
the God of thy fathers.” “Thou shalt know in thy heart that the 
Lord is God in heaven and upon earth and no other;” and the 
prophetic vision of a future state of human goodness and felicity 
rounds off his glowing picture of the Messianic time with the ex- 
clamation that the earth will be full of the knowledge of God, as the 
waters cover the sea. ‘Therefore, intellectual development, mental 
improvement, scientific study, enlightenment and progress were always 
honored, encouraged and sanctioned by ourreligion. ‘The deplorable 
fact of the treatment of Da Costa and Spinoza by the synagogue at 
Amsterdam is such a pitiable exception to the general rule, that it can 
only be accounted for by the circumstance that the Jewish congrega- 
tion there consisted mostly of men who were refugees from Spain and 
Portugal, where they breathed the breath of intolerance and persecu- 
tion, and proves once more in the history of mankind that even the 
best religious feelings are vitiated by the force of bad example, and 
succumb under the influence and the spirit of the times. Our sages 


Bode. PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


in the dark ages occupied themselves mostly with the study of mathe- 
matics, astronomy, philosophy, medicine and Talmud, and applied 
their mental acumen and sagacity in discovering and explaining the 
discrepancies between the teachings of religion and the results of 
philosophy. They thought to have accomplished this end by taking 
expressions and relations of the Bible in a figurative and allegorical 
sense. In our times, when the facts of science and revelation face 
each other in a more glaring opposition, we solve the problem by 
saying that the Bible to us is not an infallible book, that the scriptures 
are a product of men inspired with divine wisdom, but who with all 
the transcendent and excellent truths they revealed, were nevertheless 
but men, lable to err and to fail. And we are justified to think so 
by no less an authority than the prophets themselves. You know that 
they were almost all opposed to the institution of bloody sacrifices, 
insisting everywhere upon spiritual worship, whereupon a learned 
rabbi of the twelfth century declared that these sacrifices were but 
tolerated by Moses as a concession to the religious views of the 
ancient times. ‘The prophet Ezekiel protested against the Biblical 
saying, that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, pro- 
claiming that the father shall not bear the sins of the son, nor the 
son those of the father, but that every one dies in his own iniquity. 
In the spirit of this liberal conception of the Bible we have discarded 
many old usages, forms and traditions, that in former ages were con- 
sidered as an essential part of our religion. ‘The more enlightened 
class of our people does not believe in a personal Messiah to come or 
to have ever come; do not believe in the restoration of the land of 
Palestine into our possession, nor in the restoration of the Temple 
and its bloody sacrifices, and all the prayers referring to these ideas 
are stricken from the prayer book. We do not wish to be a people 
separate from others, we are perfectly satisfied and happy to be an 
integral part of the nation in the midst of which we live, Americans 
in America, Englishmen in England, Frenchmen in France, Germans 
in Germany, as true, loyal, devoted and faithful to our country and to 
our government as any other part of the nation. We believe in the 
progress of civilization, freedom and humanity with the best of our 
powers and abilities. In regard to virtue, goodness and moral duties, 
the sanctity of family life, conjugal and filial devotion and all such 
traits as constitute an honorable life, and which in the phraseology of 
the church you call Christian virtues, Christian graces, Christian 
charities, we do not differ at all from our Christian fellow-men, and 
hold them as dear and as sacred as you do. 


WHAT IS LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY, AND 
WHAT IS THE LIBERAL CHRISTIAN 
MIND? 


ADDRESS BY HORATIO STEBBINS, D. D., OF SAN FRANCISCO. 


Mr. PRESIDENT :—It is my duty, in the appointments of this occa- 
sion, to say something of that spirit and temper of mind, in which 
this occasion was ostensibly called, and to see whether or not it has 
any application to the practical working formula of Christian life, or 
any primary and essential relations to the nature of Christian truth. 
I am not to discuss a theological question, but to inquire concerning 
some great common facts, and the nature of truth. In the few 
moments that are assigned to me, let me go directly to the theme. 

Our religion is the Christian religion. Among the religions of 
mankind it has not the largest constituency, and includes perhaps 
less than one-third of the human race. Excepting Mohammedanism, 
which is a cleavage from Judaism and Christianity, it is the youngest 
religion on the earth. Less than two thousand years measures its 
historic span. It had its origin in a mountain province in the south- 
west of Asia, among a people who were before all other peoples of the 
earth in their conception of the Ove, the ever-living and true God, 
maker and governer of the world. Their great theistic ancestor, 
Abraham, a Bedouin Sheik, cherished in his heart divine promises of 
blessing and power, that should be unto all nations by virtue of that 
faith that unified the world in righteous law. Wherever he led his 
patient camels, wherever he guided his ‘pasturing flocks, or pitched 
his tent, or slept on the ground beneath the open sky, that sublime 
conception, flickering feebly in the horizon, or flaming in the zenith 
of his spirit, was the light and genius of a grand and fruitful polity, 
the polity of God in history. As a great writer has put it: “In 
Abraham’s tent lay folded the Constitution of England.” 

For centuries the prophets, priests and kings of that people pro- 
claimed the sublime monotheism of righteous law-giver and judge. 
Under this inspiration, the mind of the nation budded with hope and 
trust and prayer, and in times of dark calamity believed in the year 


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of the Lord. A shepherd boy, rising through the strangely contrasted 
vicissitudes of genius, to be soldier, poet, and king, came into such 
communion with God, that all human thought and feeling in their 
divine relations seemed to be in him, and from the heights of exultant 
joy,and from the sunless caverns of penitent woe, he voiced the 
human soul in its weakness and strength forever. 

In the bosém of such a people, guided and taught for centuries. 
under. the sublime monotheism of Abraham, there arose, in a country 
village among the hills, one who in the consciousness of God dwelling 
in him, surpassed all creatures. In him, that solitary monotheism, 
that terrible loneliness, was seen and felt as an infinite presence, dif- 
fused throughout all things, and peculiarly dwelling in the heart of 
man. In his own soul he had such communion with God, that his 
heart was inspired by Divine love, his will moved in rhythm with 
Divine will, and he could say in the natural tones of filial feeling, “I 
and my Father are one.” In him, the God whom prophets, priests - 
and kings had proclaimed, was not only or chiefly revealed in lonely 
power and inaccessible holiness, but in intimate and inspiring rela- 
tions and sympathies with man. God im Man was the supreme con- 
ception, the supreme fact; and a “‘new edition of human nature” 
and of God’s nature was issued to the human world. This profound 
personality is the chief creative force of religious history. A marvel- 
lous inspiration on which history itself has set its seal as a facé, and 
not as a theology, and therefore to be received with honor and grati- 
tude and reverent piety. It may be said without exaggeration, that 
from Jesus of Nazareth has gone forth an influence unequaled, in its 
silent, persuasive, persistent force, by that of any other being that 
was ever on the earth. At his death, to all human appearance and 
foresight, he had lived in vain, and the curtain fell and the lights were 
extinguished at the conclusion of an earthly tragedy. A few who 
were near him, won to love him by his exalted moral and spiritual 
beauty, thought to appropriate the power and grace of his name within 
the limits of their own nationality, feeling that it was enough for them 
to renew the claims of divine precedence for their countryman. Thus 
the first historic act of his followers in regard to him was an attempt 
to appropriate exclusively whatever blessings belonged to his name. 

But there came one, an Hebrew of the Hebrews, who had never 
seen Jesus, in whose soul there arose a daring idealism, giving the 
light of the knowledge of the glory of God, that liberated Jesus from 
this exclusive appropriation, and enfolded with cosmopolitan grace 


THE LIBERAL CHRISTIAN MIND. gt 


the disunited nations and countries, Jews, Greeks, slaves and freemen, 
men and women. Paul stood at the focus of history, and proclaimed 
with the power of inspired genius and prophetic intuition, the truth 
that includes all human progress, and to learn which is the education 
of the world. “He planted that tree of humanity in human society, 
under the branches of which we still dwell, and find shelter and 
protection for our highest possessions.” Thus Jesus became the 
founder of a religion. That religion, whatever else may be claimed 
for it, is founded on the fact that it is the key to human nature in all 
the divine relations of humanity, and that it was presented as a fact 
in Jesus of Nazareth. It is not a philosophy, it is not a science, it 
is not a scheme, it is a human fact. Its power lies in imbuing the 
soul of man with its spirit, and producing a kind of life, peculiar 
and unique, above the senses, above the passions, and free from the 
thrall of self-will; a life of moral and spiritual powers which the 
founder himself called the Kingdom of God. 

It is not to be wondered at, perhaps, that such a fact, presented as 
a life, should be often misconceived, and that in undertaking to find 
the how of it, the wy of it has been lost. It is not to be wondered 
at when we consider the infirmities of the mind, that the theory of it 
has often superseded the thing itself. It is not to be wondered at 
that it has often been exclusively appropriated by those who essayed 
to define it, and establish the terms of belief in it. It has commonly 
been received as a form of faith rather than as a power of life. 
There have’ been two forces at work with it, one, the company at 
Jerusalem who would confine it within the boundaries of the national 
creed, the other, Paul, who proclaimed it in its purely spiritual and 
human quality, ‘‘the power of God and the wisdom of God,” to Jew 
and Gentile, Greek and barbarian, man and woman, bond and free. 
The one has been the pure, free, spiritual aspect of Christianity, the 
other has been its limited dogmatic theologic form. And when we 
compare these two forces, however essential they both may have been 
to the historic development of Christianity, the power and prophecy 
and genius of history have been expressed in the spiritual and uni- 
versal conception of Paul—that is, the liberality of Christianity itself 
has been the essential element of its progress—and through this, in 
the face of all dogmatic tendencies, it has made its way from period 
to period, from age to age, among the nations of the earth. This 
has been the creative and renewing force of religious history, that has 
burst the bonds of ancient creeds, inspired the new ages of faith, and 


92 PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE. 


given new conceptions of the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, as a 
vital force in the soul, the simple fact, yet sublime and glorious 
mystery of God in Man. It is through this large, liberal, human 
element, that Christianity ever got out of Judea in the ancient time, 
and it is through this that it has got out of the Judeas of bigotry and 
exclusion in the modern time. ‘Through this it has got hold of the 
most influential part of the world; or, rather, has made a part of the 
world the repository of human progress and power. ‘The nations 
have been widely and beneficently affected by it, and since its epoch 
the world itself is practically another world. Christianity is more 
friendly to human nature than men have ever conceived, and Liberal 
Christianity is Christianity itself. It is identical with human nature 
in its best estate. 

When we say that our religion has changed the face of the world, 
we do not say that no other causes have worked with it. We do not 
claim that our religion has done everything ; religion is not the only 
thing in the world. If there was nothing in the world but religion, 
or if there were everything without religion, the world would be 
hardly fit to live in. In the one ease, it would be all field and no 
climate, and in the other it would be all climate and no field. e- 
ligion changes the quality of the life of the world. It is the quality 
of life in Jesus that makes him so influential. That quality of life is 
a fact, a fact of human nature, and to undertake to make the expla- 
nation of it more important than the fact itself, is like withholding 
your love from a child until you have explained the mystery of his 
temperament, or rewarding the devotion of woman with jewelry, in- 
stead of paying the grateful obeisance of an indebted soul. This 
life that was in Jesus of Nazareth is a power, an invisible moral and 
spiritual power. It is no exact matter of weights and measures, and 
well-defined proportions ; and you can no more tell how it inspires 
the soul than you can tell how bread nourishes the body. Eat your 
daily bread, as from the liberal hand of God, and live; or say you 
will eat no bread until you understand the vital chemistry, and 
starve. ‘This is the liberal element in Christianity. This is Chris- 
tianity itself. This thought is gaining ground, and as it gains, the 
whole aspect of Christendom is changed, and the whole human world 
has a new countenance, and our religion is a part of a divine order 
such as David conceived, and no after-thought contrivance to repair 
a broken-down universe, or settle the affairs of a bankrupt world: 
‘“ My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, 


THE LIBERAL CHRISTIAN MIND. 93 


and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes 
did see my substance, yet being imperfect ; and in thy book all my 
“numbers were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as 
yet there was none of them.” ‘Thus, our religion is included in the 
divine progress of humanity under God, and as “all flesh is not the 
same flesh ; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of 
beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds ;” so all life is not the 
same life, but there is one life of Nero, another of Napoleon, another 
of Scrooge, and another of the Son of Man that cometh down from 
heaven. Our religion is for the sake of moral and spiritual being, 
and moral and spiritual being is its own reason for being. ‘God 
has given us eternal life,” and the blessing of those latter ages of the 
world and ends of the earth is, that “this life is in his Son.” It 
is not a code of morals, nor a philosophy, nor a creed, nor a system 
of discipline, but a vital moral force. Why this quality of life that 
was in Jesus was not manifest a hundred thousand years ago, instead 
of day before yesterday, I do not know, more than I know why man- 
kind were not supplied with fire at the beginning. But as I believe 
that those primeval men who lived without fire were not frozen to 
death by relentless decree, for want of that which they knew nothing 
about, so I do not believe that fire was finally invented to damn 
those into who lived on the earth before Jesus, or who are living now 
ignorant of his name. There is a sense in which the religion of 
Jesus was always in the world, and never had an epoch, as human 
nature has always been in the world, and never been without divine 
signals, and testimonies, and guidance of cloud by day and fire by 
night. The culmination of that religion in the august personality of 
its founder “‘to give them the light of the knowledge of the glory of 
God” is beyond our ken, as every other personality, from the child 
that falls asleep upon your bosom, to the strong angel that veils his 
face in the presence of the Eternal One. In the view of a liberal 
faith that recognizes the eternal providence and hospitality of God, 
nothing seems more monstrous than the notion that Christianity got 
into the world in an arbitrary or main-strength fashion, or that Jesus 
pronounced a dogmatic snap-judgment on three-quarters of mankind. 
The broad world-fact of human history and human life is that Chris- 
tianity is as old as creation, that many are Christians who never heard 
of Jesus, and that many who have heard of him are not Christian. 
God is not, and never has been, a ‘‘respecter of persons; but in 
every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is ac- 
cepted with him,” 


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It is said that we are to believe something. So 7 think! But 
why are we to believe something? Because the facts warrant it? 
Or are we to believe for the sake of some advantage to ourselves, 
because something will happen if we believe, or because something 
else will happen if we do not believe? We want opinions; and men 
were never more in need of opinions than to-day; intelligent, reason- 
able, reverent opinions, such as are found only by the intellect subor- 
dinated to the moral nature, for that alone is freedom, and no amount 
of authority can stand for a moment against an awakened conscience. 
We want beliefs, such as are founded on the great a priord presump- 
tions of the mind, which were never reasoned into us, and which 
cannot be reasoned out. 

We need convictions ; the fee simple of those eternal possessions 
of moral being that are of the same nature with God, and derive 
their title from him, and make the smallest act of virtue and the 
simplest principle of duty and right of the same kind with that which 
governs God himself, and is the supreme law of a moral universe. 
We need opinions, we need beliefs, we need convictions, the results 
of thought, feeling and will. But we do not want them in the shape 
of a diploma from a cattle show, nor as certified credentials of sal- 
vation. Let religion be philosophised by all means and every way, 
as every department of human nature and human life must be and 
shall be; let the great and fruitful truths of Christianity be form- 
ulated in a truly scientific theology that shall throw off every dog- 
matic burden, but do not undertake to put in writing the terms of 
agreement between God and man, when we know beforehand that 
you cannot sign the contract without a mental reservation that lets you 
out of it when the bargain puts on the grip of responsibility. Jesus 
left no body of opinion. He wrote never a word, save when he 
stooped. and wrote in the sand to compose his mingled scorn and 
moral anguish, that he might rebuke the accusers of a fallen woman. 
Do you offer me the logic of Christian life? Do you propose the 
analysis of the work of those living crucibles of the spirit? And do 
you predicate salvation on that? I smile at your ignorant inno- 
cence, and I grieve at your superstitious credulity. ‘Tell that 
to the marines,” or to somebody whom you can scare. As to 
salvation, there can be no more saved of a man than there is of him, 
and what there is of him depends on the quality of life that is in 
him; whether it is the life of passion and self-will, or the life of moral 
and spiritual powers which have in their own right under God an 


THE LIBERAL CHRISTIAN MIND. 95 


eternal kingdom. ~ The supreme item and fact of our religion is: Js 
the same quality of life in us that was in Jesus? I confess that 
I see no evidence that Jesus ever intended to teach any dogmatic 
system of theology at all—and his sayings are singularly unfit for 
dogmatic uses. Among the things of grand human import that he 
uttered, the most fundamental is the Fatherhood of God, which makes 
man the partaker of God’s nature, and capable of knowing him as 
like knows like, and of feeling the venerating sentiments of love and 
obedience. ‘The corresponding truth is the Brotherhood of man, 
which includes a common nature that binds mankind of all nations 
and races in one common bond of being and destiny. He proclaimed 
the Kingdom of God, that perfect human society, which, the life that 
was in him, poured into individual hearts would build up. He 
assumed rather than announced the immortality of man, and leaving 
the future state under the veil of parable, gives no clue to the details 
of human destiny, and no encouragement to theological scene-painters. 
He speaks of all God’s loving kindness and pitying love, and tender 
mercies, and righteous equity, and all-seeing providence, under the 
reverent and endearing title Father in Heaven; and the majesty and 
tenderness of the old ancestral monotheism superseded all the doc- 
trines of the divine attributes which theology knew so well before it 
knew the circulation of the blood in our human veins, or that the 
earth turned on its axis. The great inspiring truths that he uttered 
were not altogether new, though renewing. 

Jesus introduced no new elements into the nature of man or the 
spiritual world, neither did God begin to be the Father of men and 
spirits on the first Christmas day. He expressed in his own per- 
sonality more fully than men had seen before what was already in 
man. ‘That which is ew in the religion of Jesus, zs Jesus himself. 
The truths that he spake were the plain every-day facts of his life, and 
he gave no other definition to his religion; and the fact that he thus 
made known the life of God in the soul, inspires his words with fas- 
cinating charm and terrible significance. When we estimate our 
religion by those things, it is as wide as the world, and as liberal as 
the air; and by those, the religion of Jesus survives after the death of 
many theologies—and Paul’s transcendent vision is realized: ‘‘Hence- 
forth we know no man after the flesh; even though we have knqwn 
Christ after the flesh. Yet now we know him so no more.” 

Thus, by Liberal Christianity I understand Christzanity ttself, and 
by the Liberal Christian mind, I understand that temper of mind and 


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thought that can see it so. I say that caz see it so; for let us say it 
frankly, and confess it with all genial sympathy of thought, that there 
are some who caznof see it so—just as when two men beholding a 
landscape, one sees no landscape but only acreage, while the other 
sees beauty and glory blending from heaven above and earth beneath. 
But who has the higher truth, he who sees a waving meadow of 
playful butter-cups and daisies, or he who sees a load of hay? Who 
can doubt which way of seeing is the way of truth and life as it is in 
Jesus? 





